LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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TJNITKD STATES OP AMEKICA. 



THE 



ONLY GOOD THING 



IN 



ALL THE WORLDS 



''I have given them Thy zuord.'' 



X* 



By Prof. Jv B. Turner 






'RINTED FOR THE AU 



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CHICAGO: 

The Open Coukt Publishing Company 

1891 






Copyright 1891, 

By Jonathan B. Turner, 

Jacksonville, III. 



■t^^ 



ERRATA. 

Page 3, line 4 to 5 of Dedication; for immeasurably read measurably . 
Page 28, line 12 from bottom ; for recreations read re-creations. 
Page 34, line 5 from bottom ; for logia read " logoi.^^ 
Page 41, line 13 from bottom ; a period instead of interrogation point 

after Oh yes. 
Page 46, line 13 from top ; for respectively read respectably. 
Page 111, line 10 from top ; for ever-Kingdom read ever-being Kingdom. 
Page 142, line 14 from bottom; for boasting read boosting. 
Page 153, line 8 from bottom ; for see note 17 read see note 15. 
Page 153, line 2 from bottom ; for see note 15 read see note 16. 
Page 154, 1st line ; for see note 16 read see note 17. 
Page 156, line 5 from bottom ; Chap. V., v. 15 should begin a paragraph 

as note 3^. 
Page 165, line 6 from bottom; for interpolation read interpretation. 
Page 167, last line ; for Crown Him Lord of all read Crown HIM Lord 

of all. 



DEDICATION. 



To ALL THE VARIOUS PEOPLES OF AMERICA, OF WHATEVER 
PARTY, SECT, SCHOOL, RACE OR LANGUAGE. 

We have in fact, if not in form, based all our civil gov- 
ernment, public schools and institutions on the only authorized 
or extant proclamation of the law and gospel of the Kingdom 
of the Heavens over all worlds and beings. We are now, im- 
measurably, enjoying this freedom, co-operating for a World's 
Fair and universal peace on this new-born continent of ours, and 
over the whole world. Ought we not, '''• everyicliere and ahvays,^'' 
as individuals, to defend unitedly these liberties against all 
despots and dogmatists, all Jesuitical sophists and apostates, 
whether reputed saints or sinners, as Christ Himself, " every- 
ichere and ahcays " did? Some reasons for this are given in 
this little book. 



PUBLISHERS' PREFACE. 



Professor Turner is a venerable man who looks back upon 
eighty-six years full of activity and devoted to the search of 
Truth, In the present book he offers to the public the main 
results of his long life's labors, and we expect that it will be very 
well worth studying how the doctrines of Christianity affected 
such a deeply religious and truth-loving mind as is that of Pro- 
fessor Turner. This, in our opinion, constitutes the main value 
of the book. We can not agree with many of the details and we 
need scarcely add that neither the subject-matter nor the 
method of its treatment is in the line of our publications. We 
have undertaken to publish the book for the author on his 
request, not because we would endorse his views, but simply 
because we respect the man and sympathize with the spirit in 
which he has written the present book. 

Editor of The Open Court. 



CONTENTS. 



Dedication 3 

Publishers' Preface .. 5 

(1.) Personal Introduction 7 

(2.) Preface 11 

I. General Principles 13 

II. Christ's Own Scripture Canon Given Us In His 

Own Words 32 

III. God's Commentaries on this Scripture Canon -_ 52 

IV. Authorized Books 70 

V. Christ Creed and Church Creed 87 

VI. Christ's Revelation of God 96 

VII. Cosmos or World, and the Universe 115 

VIII. Perpetual Re-Births and Re-Incarnations 119 

IX. The Proclamation op The Kingdom 130 

Rules op Translation 133 

Introductory History 144 

Notes -- - 156 

Supplementary Note. ---^ 162 



PERSONAL INTRODUCTION. 



In this rapid age, when the press is master of the 
world, not only are unknown men of to-day known 
almost everywhere to-morrow, but those of the widest 
reputation this year may next year be nearly forgotten. 
Especially is this true of the octogenarian who has 
retired from the public arena, but who lives on in the 
world of his own consciousness when the friends of 
other days have nearly all gone hence. 

At the suggestion of the publishers of this remarkable 
work, one of the still surviving friends of its author has 
prepared this introduction, treating briefly of one who 
forty years ago w^s known to thousands who have 
forgotten his existence, or are themselves forgotten in 
death. Owners of unfenced lands knew him as the 
pioneer in introducing the Osage orange hedge ; horti- 
culturists as their intelligent coadjutor in all efforts to 
improve the fi'uits of Illinois, and agriculturists in all 
departments knew him as an intelligent and active 
worker in the practice and science of agriculture. But 
the culture of Men and Women also received his de- 
voted attention; and in all the early efforts in behalf 
of Industrial Education, the name of Professor Turner 
was everywhere known among the foremost. 



O PERSONAL INTRODUCTION. 

But beyond all these, he was known among his in- 
timate friends as a Christian reformer, laboringf to 
separate between Religion and Theology, and to re- 
store Christianity to its early foundation in the direct 
teaching of Christ. From Templeton, Massachusetts, 
where he was born (Dec. 7, 1805), and after an educa- 
tion at Yale specially fitting him for the work, he came 
West in 1833, became connected with Illinois College, 
at Jacksonville, where for fifteen years he labored 
with the other members of the faculty to spread 
knowledge and a true Christian faith over the broad 
field of which that college was the center. From 
the first it was Christianity for which he labored —not 
for any creed; and this little volume embodies his best 
thoughts upon that subject, reconsidered and re-stated 
in his advanced age. 

^'All roads lead to Rome," says the proverb; all 
roads earnestly and honestly followed lead finally to 
the truth. Since Professor Turner began his labors 
new sciences have been born in biology, anthropology, 
language, archaeology, ethics, and the all-comprehen- 
sive science of evolution has been widely received 
among investigators. And if they who advance by 
these new lights have reached Professor Turner's con- 
clusions by a shorter route than his, they will all the 
better appreciate that intuition and brave search for 
truth by which he has reached his just conclusions. 

The first three chapters of this work have already 



PERSONAL INTRODUCTION. 9 

appeared in print, substantially as they are here, and 
the succeeding ones are more detailed elaborations of 
the first. But some still more definite and succinct state- 
ments are found in letters to the writer of this 
introduction, which will be here submitted. They 
are important as showing that in the professor's view. 
The Truth is not so because Christ uttered it, but he 
spoke it BECAUSE IT WAS thp: truth. 

As to the suggestion of a re-incarnation, etc.. Pro- 
fessor Turner says: (May 27, 1891.) 

"I mean the last chapter on Re-incarnation, only as 
a suggested provisional theory, — as some of its word- 
ings imply." 

And it will also be seen that this theory touches not 
the great truth explicit in Christ's words. Speaking 
of the object of his work, he says: (June 1st, 1891.) 

"Hoping it may awaken some philosophical discus- 
sion of the greatest of all possible philosophical truths, 
namely; those of the simple Christ Word, separated 
from all conglomerated apostacies, whether in our 
Bibles or outside of them." 

June 5th he says: 

"How many thousand years the works of God and 
the word of God will be forced to stand fighting each 
other over a mere bald name, I cannot tell, for God 
only knows; but for me, I believe in the exact Christ 
Word — not because it was written by Christ, or b}^ 
any one of his apostles, nor because the bookbinder 



10 PERSONAL INTRODUCTION. 

bound it up in the Bible, but because I find it to be 

the Truth to-day manifested by everything within me, 

and by everything rolind about me; just as He is 

said to have declared, that all men would at last 

find it to be. So I continue to be his disciple 

in spite of all the churches and philosophies and 

schools of the world, simply because I find that his 

teaching and his terms used are, here and now to-day, 

the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth." 

It would seem that the thoughts of one who holds 

such views as these should be of profound interest 

alike to scientist and sage, to Christian, Jew, Moslem 

and "Agnostic." 

E. R. ROE. 
Chicago, July -ith, 1891. 



PREFACE. 



Said the old ''Iron Duke" to an officer who asked 
him what he should do, '-'■Read your inarching orders^ 
sir.'' So we would say to all professed and inquiring 
Christians, ' '-Read yoitr inarcTiing orders^ and read 
nothing else in the Bible or out of it, till you clearly 
understand them . ' ' 

Many good people are afraid that if our proclaimed 
Christ words should be exalted to their full supreme 
place and power over all other words, it would impair 
or destroy the force of many other great truths in the 
Bible. This is exactly parallel to the fear, that 
severely and sternly holding our proclaimed Constitu- 
tional law as the supreme authority over all else, 
would impair or destroy other great truths of Ameri- 
can history and literature. 

These papers were begun as extracts from my for- 
mer private note books for the American Review, but, 
as that magazine was postponed for a time before the 
last of the papers were printed, it was thought best to 
re-print them all together in a little book by them- 
selves. Here it is to speak for itself. As I am now 
in the sixteenth year of my second childhood, on the 
down hill road of my present earthly pilgrimage, with 



II 



12 PREFACE. 

sight SO impaired that I have not read or written a 
word with my own eyes and hands for the few past 
years, I cannot even hope that in perfection of style, 
method and proof, 1 have done any sort of justice to 
the great theme on hand. I have only tried to ''blaze 
the way" through this interminable forest of hypoth- 
eses and of doubts, hoping that abler hands and 
sharper eyes may soon follow in this line of thought, 
''to prepare the way of the Lord, and make straight 
in the desert a highway for our God," and His only 
anointed teacher. 



CHAPTER 1. 

GENERAL PRINCIPLES. 

A voice said unto me, ''Write;" and I said ''what 



shall I write?" 

Business is based on science; marriage on love; re- 
ligion on both. 

Apart from science, business is bankruptcy; apart 
from love, marriage is divorce; apart from science, re- 
ligion is a fog; apart from love, it is nothing. Science 
is the absolute knowledge of facts. The Greek word 
agape^ the only word used in the New Testament for 
religious love, means pure goodness in intelligent 
activity; as agathos means goodness in repose. To 
love God and man in that pure sense is to be good 
and to do good toward both God and man, each one 
and all of us in our own proper spheres. 

Our authorized Christ words, — as given us in Mat- 
thew and John, whojly sundered from all mere church 
or state words whether of Jews or of Gentiles — alone 
of all writings tell us truly how both to be and to do 
this. "My words they are spirit, they are life." 
Christ said to Pilate when standing face to face with 
the cross: "For this purpose was I born, and came 
into the world, that I might bear witness to the 
truth," or the eternal ever-present reality of things 
and beings. His last words to his disciples in Matthew 
were to teach the world to "observe (vigilantly watch, 
keep and guard) all things whatsoever I have com- 



14 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

manded you," not what popes and priests and bibles 
and cliurches commanded in this age or any other. 

By Christ words we therefore mean only those few 
words in our books and bibles which have at least 
some pretense of being authorizred, uttered and ap- 
proved by Christ himself, according to the plainest 
reading of our records, given us for our salvation 
alone. 

By Church words we mean that immense mass of 
books and words piled around and over these Christ 
words, or self-evidently interpolated into them, by the 
Papacy and so-called churches, for their own purposes 
of despotism and dogmatism. 

FALLACIES OF SCIENCE AND FAITH. 

1. The seeming and the real, 

2. The visible and the invisible. 

3. The transient and the eternal. 

4. The local and the omnipresent. 

5. The evil and the good. 

Without the eternal interplay of each and all of 
these correlated antagonisms, beij^g, as we understand 
it, is neither possible nor thinkable. In its everlasting- 
circuits, without beginning and without end, all virtue, 
blessing, eternal good and well-being, in body and 
soul, are perpetually evolved by the triumph of the 
last factors over the first. Men and animals alike 
perceive the seeming and the transient through their 
animal eyes. The Spirit of God alone in the souls of 
all sane men enables them to correct the seeming and 
the transient by the real, the spiritual, and the eternal. 
Science has really demonstrated to us some things as 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 15 

reo-ards mere form and motion. The sun no lons^er 
seems to intelligent men as driven across the empyrean 
of the sky by invisible horses; the old seeming is 
thoroughly dispelled, and the eternal, everpresent 
REALITY is visible to the eye of the soul, though not to 
that of sense. But Science has as yet taught us noth- 
ino' new as resjards lifi^ht and life. The sun and all 
the vast hosts of the greater suns and planets still 
seem even to Professor Proctor nothino: but oreat 
coal- heaps of eternal lire. On this point the seeming 
still dominates the scientific mind almost as impe- 
riously as it does the eye of the ox. 

Science began by complaining of Theology, years 
ago, of its fanciful, cruel hell fires. Dogmatic science 
ends by demonstrating that God can make little or 
nothing else than a host of eternal hell fires, and must 
of course put us into these (if he puts us anywhere) 
after death. 

We are now in science just beginning to crawl out 
from beneath this infinite absurdity of the seeming 
into the eternal s^ood of the real. For we ourselves 
can transform the cool and unknowable cause of 
gravity in our waterfalls into all the electricity, light 
and heat needed to warm and enlio^hten our o^reatest 
cities; and Mr. Miner and others have clearly demon- 
strated that we have really no single fact that tends to 
prove that the climate of the sun, or any of the stars, 
ever was, or can be, any more uucomfortable than our 
own; and that no single fact in science even tends to 
show the simultaneous beainnino^ of all thino^s; while 
each particular kind and class of things successively 
and eternally begin and end, in the unending flow and 



16 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

circuit of being, precisely in principle as they now do 
before our own eyes. 

So much for the seeming, and the mere dogmatism 
of Science; all of which results from begging our 
WHOLE PREMISES, and assuming that the sun is what it 
seems to be, before we have scientifically demonstrated 
what it really is. Science has fairly unhitched the 
horses of the sun. True Science will soon put out 
forever its eternal fires; and the vision of our only 
true Philosopher of nearly two thousand years ago 
will become our fully demonstrated truth, that God, 
the father of all worlds, is the only light of the sun, 
and of all the stars and planets, and of all the life that 
can ever proceed from them, just as surely as he is 
the eternal force that forever moves them in their 
eternal circuit through the skies. 

For ever and ever, in all the worlds alike, the seem- 
ing, the transient and the local alone is evil; the real, 
the eternal and the omnipresent, and the eternally 
triumphant over all things, creatures and worlds, 
alone is good; is God over all, in all and through all; 
Emmanuel, God with us, for us and in us; — as the 
first word of our only great Philosopher has taught 
us; — and no dogmatism of Science or Church, no mere 
philosophy of being or of God, can ever teach us the 
contrary. Hence, in the single elements of universal 
form and motions, our true Science and our true Christ 
word have already come into an eternal philosophic 
harmony, in everything except their bald names and 
symbolisms. 

Science calls the moving and changing power of all 
forms and motions energy, or gives it some name iin- 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. IT 

plying blind force; while all generations of men, 
unsophisticated by Science, have spontaneously given 
it some name signifying God: while Christ defines all 
power, light and life as spirit, forever omnipresent 
in all that can exist, great or small, alive or dead, 
symbolized by eternal fatherhood; thus accounting for 
all life, thought, reason, form and motion that can 
ever exist by one and the same single, omnipresent, 
spiritual power: while Science really accounts for 
nothing but brute matter and brvite force. Which is 
Science ? Which is Philosophy ? Which teaches the 
omnipresent truth ? Which solves the eternal mystery 
of being, our ofl'-handed, bare-footed peasant boy of 
1800 years ago, or the immense and hideous learning 
of our Scholastic schools and teachers and churches, 
that have done little else than whelm the world in 
darkness since his day ? 

But the Church? Oh, yes, the Church! But which 
church and what church, among the hundreds and 
thousands of sects that are revising their creeds almost 
every day in the year? — as indeed they ought to do. 
And who authorized the church to tell us one single 
thing about either God or Nature that did not proceed 
out of the lips of this one and sole Philosopher and 
Teacher of us all? — this only voice of God indorsed 
to us from out the sky, and addressed to each one of 
us: this only "I say unto you," the hearer and reader 
of all lands, and not simply to old Jews and old 
churches, dead and buried, on the other side of the 
globe, thousands of years ago — the only being that 
ever spake on earth who was fit to be called both the 
son of man and the son of God. 



18 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

Did he know anything about Science and Philosoyjhy ? 
Surely any being who undertakes to teach the whole 
world a universal religion which is not based on a 
Science and a Philosophy, given us in his own words, 
must come nearer to infinite idiocy than to infinite in- 
telligence. And if he really fails here, at this most 
vital of all points, it is utterly in vain for popes and 
councils and synods and churches to attempt to patch 
up a philosophy for Him. They have been trying it 
now for 1500 years, with nothing but perpetual failure 
and disaster, through the same fatal error that has 
wrecked and annihilated so many of our Sciences and 
Philosophies and creeds; starting out on begged pre- 
mises; putting guesses for knowledge and facts, ca- 
reering endless imaginations as verified realities; build- 
ing Utopian dreams instead of the eternal logoi, — rea- 
sons, rock-truths, omnipresent and ever-present and un- 
changeable axioms and eternal truths of the everbeing 
and everlasting and unending cosmos of God, founded 
only on the Christ words. 

Till some of these hideous fallacies are corrected, 
we can never have a science, a philosophy, a law, a 
gospel, a religion or a salvation, that is worth keep- 
ing over night; for no one was ever worth it that did 
not proceed directly from this one voice of the son of 
man and son of God, before whose eternal tribunal 
alone all truth and reason, all law and order, are for- 
ever to be tested and tried, in this world and all other 
worlds. 

Neither Plato nor the Greeks, neither Moses nor 
the Jews, neither Paul nor the Apostles, nor the Ro- 
mans, nor our Tolstoi Quakers, nor our John Calvins, 



IN ALL THE WOELDS. 19 

neither onr American Mormons, Sects, nor Agnostics; 
not all the Schools and Churches of the whole wide 
world, have given us a scrap of true Philosophy on 
which this great Republic of ours can safely stand for 
an hour, except that which has proceeded from this 
lone voice of the sky. 

Neither our Thomas Paine nor our Colonel Inger- 
soll, nor Voltaire nor Bradlaugh of Europe, nor any 
other living man, in the eighteen centuries of the past, 
has ever been able to turn td the right or the left of 
a single proposition laid down for us in our authorized 
and verifiable Christ words, as we read them in the 
Greek of to-day. What havoc they, each and all of 
them, have made with all our so-called Christianities, all 
our chaotic, tumultuous Church words — used mainly 
to hide the Christ words from our sight, — the world 
knows by heart. It can no longer be concealed, 

Mr. Bradlaugh' s recent arraignment of Christianity, 
for its cruel and infamous assaults upon Science, neither 
Mr. Gladstone nor all Europe can answer. But not 
even Mr. Bradlauorh alleo-es, or dares to alleo^e, that 
one single verifiable Christ word is responsible for any 
one of all these infinite infamies. On the contrary, there 
is no Science abroad under heaven to-day, there never 
was any on the face of the earth, worth sheltering and 
protecting, that was not inspired, sheltered, pro- 
tected, nurtured and cared for, by these same imper- 
ishable Christ truths: whether in so-called Pagan, 
Hebrew, Mahometan or Christian lands. We have, 
therefore, at least one teacher who never begged his 
premises, nor dealt in fallacies, which any or all of 
the ages have been able to overthrow. Has the world 



20 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

ever had aii}^ other? If so, please tell us who, where 
and what he was ! 

He spoke of Faith, of Reason, and of Truth. He 
defined faith as "fidelity to God, in the little we do 
know, and implicit trust in him for the infinite we do not 
know." He spoke of truth as ''the eternal and ever- 
present reality of things, manifested in all that can 
ever exist:" of reason, as ''the eternal relation of 
each to each, of all to the whole, impressed by the 
hand of God on everything that exists." No mere 
human words and symbols, nor human power, can 
make either a reason or a truth, any more than they 
can create a cosmos. They are but the mere finger- 
boards, that point the w^ay toward them, inspired or 
uninspired. Till we get at the substance, we grasp 
nothing but the shadow; and verbiage alone cannot 
make even the shadow. 

A forcible writer has said, ' 'Man is a compound of 
dust and deity; the dust is forever escaping, but the 
divine eternally abides." An old Philosopher said, 
"God is my father, and Nature is my mother; I look 
to my Father for all truth, duty and reason, while I 
yield to my Mother in all mere feeling and tastes." 

God is the invisible, ever-present essential of all 
reason and truth, all force, life and spirit. Nature 
is the SUBSTANTIAL MANIFESTATION of all visiblc gracc 
and beauty, form, order and color; each alike without 
beginning and without end. 

Paul uttered a great truth when he said, "God was 
in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself." But 
Christ uttered a far greater truth, when he demon- 
strated to us that God is forever in all things that can 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 21 

exist, small and great, alive and dead; and in Christ 
himself, more than in all else, reconciling all worlds 
unto himself, by eternally creating and re-creating, 
ffeneratino^ and reoeneratino- and resurrectino:, in 
eternal succession, all thins^s and beinofs that exist 
rio'ht before our eves, out of nothing: visible to mortal 
eyes. 

A Science, a Philosophy, and a Faith that does not 
recognize these great, eternal, omnipresent truths, in 
all that is within us and in all that is round about us. 



is neither worth reading nor believing; and our 
Christ words everywhere teach us that any man who 
will believe anything without a good and satisfactory 
reason deserves spanking rather than saving. 

God's will (houleema) is as eternally done in the 
moral and spiritual world as it is in the physical, but, 
like all other good fathers. His most benevolent wishes 
and desires {theleemci) are perhaps never fully realized. 
His eternal avill is that every moral being, in all 
worlds, should be wholly free to choose good and 
evil for himself, and perpetually reap the fruits of his 
own doing, and thus forever serve God, as an inspira- 
tion to all that is good, or as a continued warning 
against all that is evil. In one way or the other, 
serve God he musj, so long as he exists, and in all 
worlds alike, as necessarily as a stone drops to the 
earth, or a balloon rises toward the sky; he only 
chooses his own way and method of doing it, as the 
stone and balloon do not. 

In morals, as well as physics, God is forever with 
the majority, and on the side of the strongest battal- 
ions. In physical warfare the rich and the power- 



22 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

ful, who can marshal the greatest array of numbers, 
cannon and lire-arms, are the majority, and present 
the strongest battalions, that will surely win the day. 
In morals, God and one single pure soul forever make 
both the majority and the strongest battalion, that 
will forever ride forth, conquering and to conquer, 
despite all armies and navies, all schools, churches and 
empires, through all time and through all eternity. 
Who that one pure soul on earth is and was, no I a 
child in Christendom ten years old but well knows. 
What armed battalions, what external forces, soph- 
istries, dress-parades, have we at hand, that w^e can 
marshal against a force like this! Like the invisible 
light and air, it creeps in everywhere, and undermines 
and overthrows the loftiest and strongest structures 
of man. Who are we that we can fight against God ? 

And why are we frightened at miracles ? We 
are ourselves but so many bundles of miracles, 
wholly inexplicable to ourselves. All law is but the 
mere visible order of the miracle; it forever starts out 
from, and at every step of its movement treads upon, 
and at last sinks out of sight into utter, unfathomable 
mystery and miracle. 

No man ever lived who can explain to the bottom 
how a candle burns, or how a bl^de of grass grows, 
otherwise than by saying, ' 'that is the will of God. ' ' 
A pig might think that the visible order of an army's 
march was the cause of its march, or that the order in 
which the hands of a watch move, or a wheel turns, was 
the cause of the movino^ and turnino^. But a rational 
man cannot think so, for there is a spirit in man as a 
man, and ''the inspiration of the Almighty giveth to 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 23 

THEM understanding," in all things alike. To the pig 
no such spirit is given. This utterance in Job, given to 
the world perhaps before any Jew was born, cer- 
tainly before Christ was, is the only definition of in- 
spiration given in the whole Bible, and the only true one 
known in extant literature, the only one the Jews ever 
acknowledged; but still it is the last one either the 
Papal or Sectarian Church will ever accept. All their 
air-castles are built on wholly other foundations: 
Christ alone of all our teachers seems to have fully 
recoo^nized and believed in it. 

In his first speech to his disciples and to the multi- 
tude, in that miraculously woven web of axioms and 
eternal truths which he laid at the bottom of his then 
and there declared, defined and instituted "Kinoxlom 
of the Heavens," over all worlds and beings, all times 
and eternities, he quoted no word or scrap from the 
Jews of olden times, except to correct, reject or amend 
it. Yet his utterance, as he himself declares, covers 
all law and prophecy, all of eternal duty and destiny 
essential to that kingdom, and needful to men now on 
earth, or in the heavens. ' In all his instructions to the 
twelve and to the seventy, and in his prolonged final 
discourse to his disciples in John, not a single scrip- 
ture text is anywhere quoted or alluded to, as either 
basis or sanction of anything he taught or said. So 
utterly — in fact in all his utterances — does he make 
his own personal words the way, the truth, the life 
and the light of men. 

To the Devil and the old Jews, who were perpetual- 
ly quoting scripture to him, he quoted scripture back 
again; and he served them right, too. But even with 



24 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

them, he everywhere insisted, "I give you the bread 
of heaven ; Moses gave you not that bread." This 
was not only true and right, but absolutely indispensa- 
ble; for the old kingdom of the Jews, even in its best 
days, was scarcely more like his kingdom of the heav- 
ens than was that of the Romans under Nero ; while 
the old Javeh of the Jews was no more like Christ's 
Father in the heavens, than was the Jupiter of the 
Greeks, as each is presented to us in the facts of his- 
tory. Wholly apart from the panegyrics and cam- 
paign speeches of their admirers, there was really 
nothinoj in them fit for the eternal kino^dom of the 
heavens, and the real Christ of God to sanction or to 
sanctify. Though all nations and all peoples on earth 
instinctively know that G.od is good, and as instinct- 
ively attribute goodness to him, in all their spontaneous 
songs and worships, whatever their records of facts 
may have been. 

If the Jews had never existed, if no miracle had ever 
been recorded, if there were no scrap of human litera- 
ture on the face of the earth but only our authorized, 
verifiable Christ words, they would to-day be just as 
unquestionably true and thoroughly verifiable as they 
are now, as they were when they first fell from his lips. 
It is not true, and never was true, that our Christ 
words either stood or fell on miracles or mysteries or 
on the endorsement of schools, churches, popes or 
priests. They stand to-day where they always have stood, 
and where he himself stood, alone and single-handed 
against an embattled world. If any other human utter- 
ance makes them more truthful or more clear, it is only 
as a smoked glass helps weakened eyes to see the sun. 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 25 

Histories, myths, miracles and parables, whether 
facts or fictions, can do nothing at best and at most 
but illustrate such ever-present, eternal principles. 
Our scholastic and irrational habit of ransacking the 
grave-yards and catacombs of the past to find the ever- 
livino: God has not the slioiitest sanction of the Christ 
words. Yet for fifteen hundred years past the so-called 
Church has done little else with these Christ words 
than to crucify them between the two thieves of papal 
scriptural analogy and church orthodoxy. Wholly 
based on the begged premise and false assumption that 
the Church words and the Christ words are identically 
the same. AVhen we have reduced the Christ words 
to the level of our superimposed and interpolated 
Church words by bald scriptural analogies, and whit- 
tled them all down into mere tags to attach to our huge 
bundles of ready-made orthodoxy to give to our work 
credence and power over the minds of the compelled or 
volunteer slaves of the Church, creed, and the sect, we 
have totally extinguished that one voice from the sky 
amid the babel of our orthodoxies and the eternal free- 
dom of his kingdom of the heavens over all worlds and 
beings, and given the world of men either the most 
direful despotism or a clamorous anarchy of sects in 
place of it. Is this God the father of all that exists ? 
Is this Christ the saviour of all men ? No I it is sheer 
cant and dogmatism ; nothing but wind and gas. What 
is such wooden-legged reason, based upon begged 
premises, worth either in faith or science ? 

On similar begged premises, based only on the 
seemino^ with not a frao^ment of the demonstrated real, 
our wooden scientists and theologians tell us how God 



26 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

himself began business in the world and how he will 
close it out. How he builds worlds out of fogs and 
star dust; all living things out of one unknowable cell; 
men out of monkeys and monkeys out of men, — which 
last, by the way, is no great trick. But where is the 
truth ? Only an eternal and blundering guess to begin 
with, and not even a guess to end with. When that 
most wonderful and eloquent of all orators. Professor 
Proctor, discoursed to us with surprising brilliancy 
and power that the whole hemisphere of suns and 
worlds thrown upon the canvas before us were nothing 
but vast globes of fires, with an argument based whol- 
ly upon ''it seems so and so," at the close each blazing- 
hell of a world seemed to cry out in my ears : "It 
seems ! it seems ! it seems ! it is not real and never can 
be." 

All things must be stripped of their seeming before 
we get at their reality: which lies wholly in that voice 
of eternal silence never heard by mortal ear, and that 
light of eternal glory never seen on sea or land. The 
reason of God and the truth of God that fell first to us 
from the Christ lips alone. 

And when soon after that most eloquent lecturer 
Professor Wendling told us of Saul, exalting him as 
the great philosophic source and spring and power of 
our Christian truths, with so exaggerated a view that 
if Paul was about our world we had little need of Christ 
or of God himself, I could almost feel the old apostle 
shrugging his shoulders from beneath his eighteen cen- 
turies of dirt, and saying: "Apart from Christ I am 
nothing, and never was and never can be anything." 

Stranger still, that most learned Rabbi, Solomon 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 27 

Scliindler, of Boston, in his twenty-four lectures to his 
Hebrew synagogue arrays before us twenty-four of the 
most learned Jews from Moses' day to our own time, 
to demonstrate that these heroes of Judaism have an- 
nihilated the Old Testament and monopolized to them- 
selves the substantial Christ words of the New. But 
he seems never to have heard that the Christ of God 
was born a Jew, lived as a Jew, and in three short years 
after his endorsement out of the sky, his divine thought 
practically revolutionized all the religions and empires 
of the globe — that of the Jews included — and gave to 
the children of men the only philosophy now extant 
upon the earth, on the basis of which it is possible to 
bring peace on earth, and create here and now a new 
heaven and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteous- 
ness. 

Paul called Felix "his most noble Felix," and in- 
terwove into his letters an ingenious patchwork of 
analogies with their old literature, only to render the 
Christ words more acceptable to men of that age. 

But we cannot make a gospel out of Paul's terms of 
courtesy nor out of his patchwork of analogies, neither 
could he ; indeed, he never tried. But we have tried 
it and we have utterly failed. 

Our Christ words give us no after death or other 
world theories except that the eternal kingdom of the 
Father and of the heavens is to go with us, be with us, 
in us, and over us and all about us wherever we may 
go or be, whether before death or after it ; forever un- 
changeably the same. 

But the old papal church theories were unutterably 
stupid and diabolical ; they repelled, burnt up and ex- 



28 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

terminated all reason and wisdom but their own, and 
substituted their own for the reason and wisdom of 
Christ ; a very considerable mistake, both in its begin- 
ning and its outcome. 

All the doubts and distrusts, all the fears and an- 
tagonisms of the world, all the sects and schisms, all 
the errors, blunders, crimes and infamies of the so- 
called church have grown out of the superimposed, in- 
terpolated church words, or out of translations and in- 
terpretations constrained and distorted by attempts to 
subject and subjugate real Christ words to these an- 
tagonistic church words, by a hocus pocus of scripture 
analogy. Amid these endless sophistries and the con- 
fusions of all reason and all truth, one might as well 
attempt to find the sunlight amid the lumber of some 
dark cellar with a tallow candle in his hand as to try 
to find the real Christ words under any such conditions. 
The first step out of the difficulty is to blow out the 
candle and to come up out of the cellar into the day- 
light, where alone the daylight can be found. God's 
eternal providences in his recreations are, like his 
mercies, new every morning, fresh every evening, re- 
peated every moment of our lives ; and science finds 
that nothing else ever perishes, even if human souls do. 

All forces, powers, and spirits as well as all visible 
things and beings revolve in everlasting circuits with- 
out beginning or end ; at every moment parts some- 
where sinking into the invisible chaos and debris of the 
past for respite and repairs, while other parts eternally 
and momentarily are rising refreshed, repaired, regen- 
erated and resurrected, into the renewed activities and 
service of the forever returning life and light of day. 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 29 

AVhat matters it if in this process of eternal repairs 
the refreshed, reunited and resurrected life, powers, 
souls and spirits become oblivious in part or in whole 
of all that transpired in their former pilgrimages ? If 
they are on each fresh infantile start gifted with all the 
increased powers and capacities they have rightfully 
earned in all their pilgrimages before, and in their final 
earthly pilgrimage shall have the whole panorama 
of their entire earthly career clearly opened to their 
view, and see that the grand meaning of the whole was 
simply to teach to their souls, through whatever earth- 
ly body they were acting, more and more of the great 
lesson of all the eternities : to know the Father of all, 
the only ever-living and true God, as revealed to us by 
Jesus Christ, which knowledge alone he declares to us 
is in itself the only true eternal life. 

Probably the wisest half of all the poets, prophets, 
preachers and teachers of earth and time, have inti- 
mated their belief that the thousands of millions of hu- 
man souls every few years disappearing from the earth 
never perish, but for indefinite periods of time reap 7 
pear in our new-born infantile forms till by the disci- 
pline of earth they come to know God, and are thus 
invested with imperishable life, fitting them for any 
sphere or any place. 

On this point our Christ words give us absolutely no 
theory. But our papal church words insist on the 
theory that every soul born into the world is a new 
creation of God : each for a single glimpse at the earth, 
whether for a day or for a hundred years, predestined, 
foremarked, the vast multitude to eternal torment : 
the very few who will implicitly believe that the voice 



Q 



THE ONLY GOOD THING 



of a papal priest is everywhere and always the voice of 
God, are predestined to endless delights. 

On this theory the race is forever in Niagara cata- 
racts, sinking into an eternal hell and gathered only 
by spoonfuls to the joys of heaven. We insist that 
our simple Christ word leaves us all free to accept or 
reject either of these theories, or to believe and trust 
in God and in our Christ word from day to day without 
forming any theory for ourselves or others. 

If we accept our Christ word wholly emancipated 
from the pessimism of the church words, and subject 
them only to the universal Logos or reason of God, as 
manifested and expressed in all things that are and in 
all the true sciences and literatures of the race, we 
shall soon decide which of these two theories, if either, 
is true ; at least we shall find no Christ word against the 
first theory, while many of them are arrayed against 
the last. 

If our plainest Christ words and rulings in these two 
possibly authorized books of Matthew and John are 
in any sense true, no other authorized book in the 
whole Bible can be wholly true, though of the greatest 
use for purposes of corroboration or illustration : but 
still ever to be held in entire subjection to that onl}^ 
truth which is from above and is forever to stand high 
exalted above all possible church and state words, 
throughout all lands and ages, all time and all eternit}^, 
as every word that deserves to be called the word of 
God forever does and forever must. '' I am the resur- 
rection and the life : the first and the last, the begin- 
ning and the end, the way, the truth and the life." 

How can such a being enter into any sort of a part- 



IX ALL THE WORLDS. 31 

nership with the old Moses and the old Solomon, the 
old Jew and the old Gentile ? To attempt it is to drag 
himself down to their level, never to raise them up to- 
Avard his. 

Hence the church scripture canon and commentaries 
are totally different from and antagonistic to the 
scripture canon and commentaries of Christ, of God, 
of nature, and of universal heins;, as we will hereafter 
attempt briefly to show. 



32 THE ONLY GOOD THING 



CHAPTER II. 

« 
Christ's own scripture canon given us in his 

own words. 

In all written documents, whether from God or man, 
but three simple things are always to be rigorously as- 
certained : 

1. Their authority. 

2. Their true meaning. 

3. Their actual truth and reason. 

According to Matthew, Christ, after he had risen 
from the dead, appointed a meeting with the disciples 
in Galilee, solely to give to them and to the world His 
own scripture canon in His own words ; and this is 
Matthew's report of it : ''All authority is given unto 
Me in heaven and on earth ; go ye, therefore, and 
teach all nations, baptizing them into the name of the 
Father, and of the Son, and of the Spirit of Holiness, 
teaching them to observe (or to watch, keep and guard) 
whatsoever I have commanded you; andlo! (on this 
condition) I am with you every day, even unto the end 
of the world. ' ' 

This is spoken to those eleven trained disciples 
alone. First, they are to teach all people, as 
Christ Himself did by precept and example, in all 
places and at all times; and not simply to officially 
harangue them on set occasions, as he never did. Se- 
cond, they are to consecrate them by baptism when 
desired to the Father, whom He alone had truly re- 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 33 



vealecl; and to the Son who had revealed Him; and to 
the Spirit of Holiness in whomsoever or wheresoever 
found; all of one and the same spirit as truly as gold 
is everywhere one and the same substance, whether 
found in its orio^inal mountain masses or in coined 
doubloons, or in the scattered dust of the street. 
Third, they were to teach what he had already com- 
manded them to teach, not what the old Jews, whether 
inspired or uninspired, had commanded them; not 
what the new apostles or coming popes and priests 
might command them, but simply and solely '^what- 
soever I have commanded you''^ — my only eleven 
trained and competent disciples. And even these are 
to teach nothing whatever of their own thoughts, pre- 
judices or prepossessions, but only what he had 
practically commanded them to teach. If we look 
back to find what that was, we readily perceive that 
He had commanded them to teach nothing in particu- 
lar about His own person, His pedigree, or the daily 
incidents of His life, or the terrific tragedy of His 
death; none of their own thoughts or opinions as to 
whether he did or did not fulfill old prophecies, or 
conform to old commandments; nothing of the so- 
called miracles, whether real or imaginary. In short, 
nothing whatever of their own, but only and simply 
and severely what He Himself in His own words had 
COMMANDED them to teach, either directly or by neces- 
sary implication. And this, of course, includes noth- 
ing that He casually said to individual persons — as to 
Nicodemus and the young ruler and to the old Jews — 
out of which loose and personal and casual talks so 
many sham gospels have been manufactured to the 



34: THE ONLY GOOD THING 

utter exclusion of those things he had commanded 
them to teach. 

All these things may be exceedingly interesting and 
illustrative; but if they were altogether struck from 
the record, or if the whole of the Old Testament had 
never been written, or if all of the New Testament 
were blotted out except these simple Christ words, 
even this irreparable loss of illustration would not 
alter or change by the tithing of a hair the meaning, 
the force or the demonstrable truth of those words 
which Christ had really commanded His disciples to 
teach in His name. 

That strange and outlandish "Peter Rock Text," in 
16th of Matthew, contradictory in style and thought 
to all else Christ ever said, the only possible basis of 
a despotism in all His words, is surely not among His 
commanded teachings, for He charged them on the 
spot to tell no man of it. So, providentially, the 
place in which they interpolated it killed its authority 
dead before they had even written it down, whether 
we ever get it out of the Greek or not. 

His great inaugural address before His disciples and 
the multitude, which Matthew declares to have' been 
given and heard with an authority unparalleled by any 
other utterance on earth, is, in fact, the basis of 
his entire teaching ; for in a series of inimitable fire- 
side symbolisms it clearly defines and depicts the spirit, 
the power, the elemental principles, the logia or the 
reasons, laws and exclusive axiomatic rock truths, of 
His proposed kingdom of the heavens, over all worlds 
and beings, all times and places, in few words reveal- 
ing its sovereign head, the Father, His true relations 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 35 

to His children on earth and in all other worlds, and 
all the laws, duties and destinies that attach to that 
kingdom of the heavens in all time and all eternity. 
All this and much more will clearly appear if the big- 
otry of the papacies and sects ever allow this document 
to be truly translated, read, analyzed and understood 
as it is clearly written in the Greek text; but the papa- 
cy shoved this address wholly aside as an old sermon, 
to give them a chance of setting up their own scripture 
canon in opposition to Christ's, so characteristically 
and clearly declared to the whole world of men, and 
thus be enabled themselves to give to their proclaimed 
i i very God of very God ' ' a suitable philosophy and 
creed of their own, using this primal essence and sub- 
stance of all known Christ words only as -a mere mis- 
cellaneous clatter of proof texts for labeling their own 
doofmas, lavino- a terrific stress on Moses and David 
and Solomon and all the despots of olden time, whom 
the Christ scripture canon wholly rejects, and whose 
descendants had already crucified Him because He 
would submit to none of their bigotries. This certain- 
ly was not a very modest, even if it was temporarily a 
very successful, vuidertaking. 

The next thing which Christ explicitly commands 
His disciples to teach is found in His instructions to 
the twelve and to the seventy in Matthew x. All this 
our papacies and dress-parade creed-makers ignore, 
mistranslate, turn bottom up and evade as thoroughly 
as they do His first inaugural address on which it is 
wholly based. In expounding these very plain words 
we must all jump back to Moses, to David, and to 
Solomon, to Paul and to the Revelations, back and 



36 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

forth till we are unable to believe a single word it con- 
tains as it is really written. By actual count there 
are one hundred and twelve references in the mars^in 
of these commandments to all parts of the pope's 
scripture canon, and only six to Christ's scripture 
canon, and none at all to Christ's inaugural 
address, on which it is wholly based. Has this Son 
of Man in these days anything at all to do with His 
own religion? 

The next public utterance in order is His discourse 
to His disciples and the multitude in the 23d of 
Matthew. He here warns them against what they are 
to reject and abhor in their Jewish church or religion, 
and in all other mere hereditary, formal and sacerdotal 
religion, whether Protestant, or Papal, or Mormon. 
One is at first inclined to think this whole utterance a 
caricature, but on a closer inspection he will perceive 
it to be a life likeness of all the hereditary formalisms 
and mere creed religions of the globe, throughout all 
the ages. 

All that follows in Matthew is illustrative and ex- 
planatory of principles already laid down, and of events 
which are soon to take place; though at what particu- 
lar time. He declares is known only to the Father. 
The spiriting of any part of it away to some future 
world is wholly a work of supererogation, for what is 
true in principle in any one part of God's eternal king- 
dom of the heavens is equally true in all other parts, 
or there never could have been any such kingdom, for 
God cannot be one thing in oneplace and wholly an- 
other thing in some other place, or rule on one principle 
in one place, and on wholly another, in some other place. 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 37 

The next series of lessons given to His disciples is 
recorded in the book of John, Chapter 1-i, immediate- 
ly after the supper and the feet washing, and just be- 
fore the crucifixion, in which, among many other 
things of interest. He so fervently exhorts them to 
heed His own words and commandments and teachings 
whatever may become of those of Moses or the Jews 
of olden times, or of the popes and churches of modern 
times ; and in which He so inimitably expounds to them 
the way in which the invisible spirit of truth of God 
and of Christ is, and must forever be, the in-dwelling 
teacher and enlightener of every human soul : " I in 
them and thou in me, that they may all be one in us, 
even as I and my Father are one." 

This long discourse He concludes with a prolonged 
apostrophe to God in order to make His instructions 
the more impressive on their minds, which many have 
mistaken for a formal prayer, but both before and 
after it, it is described as things said to thsm^ and not 
as a prayer offered to God. Now there is not a man 
or woman of common sense in all Christendom, not 
already bedeviled with some theology, but that knows 
perfectly well what the spirit of truth, of Christ and 
of God is wherever they meet it. And how widely 
essential it is and ever has been to Christian harmony 
and concord the whole world round ! Yet hundreds 
and thousands have been expelled from the church, 
thumbscrewed, tortured and racked, or even burnt 
alive at the stake for teaching exactly what Christ so 
inimitably teaches His own disciples in these chapters, 
as the very ground and basis of His whole religion. 
The spirit of God and His kingdom, of Christ and His 



38 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

truth, not away oif on some high throne up in the 
heavens, but forever right about you, and right within 
your very heart of hearts, forever inspiring in all true 
souls their true duty and true allegiance to both God 
and man, as really and truly as invisible gravity and 
cohesion are in all physical bodies, holding them in 
their true forms and places. Yet, even our pilgrim 
forefathers whipped pious Quakers at the cart tail for 
teaching such heresies, because contradictory to their 
own diabolical creeds. 

These are the chief things, and probably in effect 
the only things, that Christ has anywhere commanded 
His disciples, or anybody else, to teach or to preach 
in His name. 

The uniqueness of this Christ's scripture canon is 
characteristic, for He alone was in the habit of settling 
forever by a single word or phrase essential points, 
which it required of the church, ship loads of sophis- 
tries and commentaries to seem to set aside or evade. 
No other being ever on earth could possibly have ut- 
tered it or dictated it, or even conceived it ; but in face 
of it —in the whole of the popes' big Bible — we have 
but two very small, very unique books, Matthew and 
John, that have even the pretense of any authority 
from Christ. These books in their very outset base 
themselves solely on truth and reason. The logoi, the 
reasons of God given us by Christ for His kingdom of 
the heavens ; the logos, or the reason of God, which 
John declares is first and foremost of all manifested 
to us by the Christ and the Christ word, and through 
every human soul made in the image of God, and 
through all other creatures and things that have been 



IN ALL THE WOKLDS. 39 

created, each and all after their kinds, enlightening 
every man that cometh into the world. 

This logos of God, Christ defines as universal truth, 
through which alone all souls, as well as all beings 
and things, must be forever saved. But the papacy 
some three hundred years after, tumbled all this into 
their promiscuous piles of mere verbiage and dogma- 
tism, leaving us nothing but an everlasting jingle of 
^' words, words," dug up out of piles of doctored He- 
brew consonants, and proved only by some other set 
of ^ ' words, words, ' ' till all reason and truth is utterly 
lost in their interminable wilderness of words and do2:- 
mas. Such are the church words even to this day. 
But God symbolized as the exclusive and ever present 
father of all, Christ as the exclusive and ever present 
teacher of all, and man as the exclusive and ever present 
brother of all, with their united kingdom forever in 
all, over all and through all that can exist, solely for 
the salvation and highest ultimate good of all, is our 
only declared Christ word. It can generate nothing, 
ordain nothing, and tolerate nothing, but the highest 
individual freedom and eternal well being, securing 
glory to God in the highest, and not by piecemeal. 

The first act of Christ's public life was to get Him- 
self, though a born Jew, baptised out from all Judaism 
and into the most heretical sect then on earth, with 
the high approval of " the voice out of the sky ' ' ; 
though Herod, the king of the Jewish church, cut off 
the head of John, the leader of this heresy, to please a 
dancino^-o'irl. 

From this time onward in all His commanded in- 
structions to His disciples He never quoted a Avord or 



40 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

syllable from the Old Testament with approval, or 
even to corroborate His trath, though He often 
quoted it to confound the machinations of the 
devil and the old Jevs^s ; and the leaders of this old 
Hebrew church, in spite of the heathen Pilate, finally 
crucified Him because He discarded their Old Testa- 
ment. Surely He had not much reason to either fall 
in love with or quote the Jewish Bible or church. 
And in His commanded instructions He never even al- 
ludes to it except to criticise or throw it aside, and 
everywhere and always, down to the very last words 
He said to Pilate, insists even to weariness, that His 
own words, His own personal voice utters all the 
truth that He will ever stand responsible for before 
men. In entire accord with this, is Christ's scripture 
canon laid down for us in Matthew. But the papacy 
three hundred years or so after His death, in their new 
anti-Christ scripture canon, saw fit, in spite of all His 
acts and protests, not only to reinvest and overload 
Him and His words with the full responsibility of all 
the old myths and bigotries, and histories and despot- 
isms of the Old Testament, but forsooth to make this 
whole vast pile of Hebrew consonants as its priests 
have chosen to interpret and to read it, of equal, if 
not superior, authority to the voice of this only son of 
man and revealer of God to man, thus wrapping both 
Him and His gospel in the winding sheet of death, 
that, like a blizzard snowstorm of despotisms and dog- 
mas, extinguished the intellect and froze the heart of 
the race for more than a thousand years. Christ Him- 
self clearly foretold this as the darkening of the sun 
itself and the turning of the moon into blood ; and 



lis ALL THE WORLDS. 41 

cv^en Paul foresaw and predicted it, that the Christ 
and His kino-dom could not come until ''that man of 
sin had been shown up to the world as the son of per- 
dition who opposeth and exalteth Himself above all 
that is called God, or that is worshiped." 

And what ' ' son of perdition ' ' can do worse than to 
defend a voluminous scripture canon totally contrary 
in form and spirit to that enjoined upon His apostles, 
and upon the World in the most solemn utterance of 
Christ's last words on earths Let the heavens fall, 
but let the Christ of God speak and be heard ! 

Before our courts the meanest man in Christendom 
can declare in few words or many what he will and 
will not be responsible for in bearing his witness to 
the truth. Has this son of God and son of man, this 
greatest of all truth tellers ever born into the world, 
any white man's rights on earth which the church and 
the teacher is bound to respect? And can He be al- 
lowed to state them for Himself in the plainest and 
briefest possible language? Oh, yes? But as the 
translators have fixed it up we are only to observe the 
Christ scripture canon, as we would observe a passing 
cloud or dumb show. 

But the dress paraded popes' scripture canon we are 
to vigilantly watch, keep and guard, or be at once out- 
lawed from all human society ; tortured, thumb- 
screwed, racked, tongues cut out, gibbeted, burnt 
alive at the stake, ruthlessly slaughtered in our homes, 
or on needless battle fields by the thousand ; and that 
for a thousand successive years, till the wretched dog- 
mas of the papacy instead of the Christ words become 
so burnt into our very bones that we are unable to get 

4 



42 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

them even out of ourselves, and must still keep on 
sending the church and the church words even to the 
heathen, although Christ Himself clearly forewarned 
us in His last great public speech, that in so doing we 
were in danger of making "proselytes twofold more 
the children of hell" than ourselves. For by our 
methods, our gunpowder, whisky and vices work fast- 
er than our missionaries do or can, overladen as they 
are with the defense and maintenance of our anti-Christ 
orthodoxies. 

Paul constructed a series of ingenious analogies be- 
tween the old and new religions to help the old Jews 
climb up to Christ. He no more thought his analogies 
a gospel than Max Mtiller thinks his to be a gospel. 
Had he imagined that the old theologians would trans- 
form them into one, and run them downward into the 
cellar kitchens of Judaism to hunt up all the myths, 
customs and conceits of that queer people, who cruci- 
fied Christ because He could not agree with them and 
make their dead and discarded opinions an equal part 
of the veritable Christ word, he would no doubt have 
burned up his letters before he ever sent them. I am 
asking for nothing new or strange. I am propos- 
ing nothing whatever of my own. I ask for noth- 
ing more or less than the plain, simple reading of our 
authorized Christ word . I ask no more and wil 1 accept no 
less, for I believe in Christ alon e as the only entirely 
truthful, religious and philosophical teacher that ever 
trod the earth. 

When He said, " I am the way, the truth, the life, 
and the light," it was by a divine egotism conscious 
within itself that it had gathered up into itself all of 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 43 

the past that was worth keeping, and therefore threw 
before itself the only light that could be safely fol- 
lowed, even that light that enlighteneth every man 
that cometh into the world. 

Oar old papists translated this whole beautiful 
Christ word under the guidance of their scripture 
canon backward into their old Jewish and pagan three 
flat world systems of astronomy; the one visible 
heaven overhead, abDve which and wholly out of reach 
and out of the way, was the home of the gods and the 
blessed, the ever yawning and fiery hell beneath, and 
the flat earth forever lying still between the two. And 
if any human being questioned their philosophy or 
their astronomy or their translations, the doctors of 
the church soon doctored him with pincers and with 
fire. But the Christ word cannot be translated on the 
basis of any such puerile scheme, and if it ever gets a 
true translation it will be found to be to-day quite on 
a level with, and at some points even ahead of our most 
advanced astronomers and philosophers; and our scien- 
tific men, though through many tribulations, have done 
far more to redeem it from this heathen diss^race than 
our church men have done. Indeed, our real church 
men have done all in their power to hinder it, while 
our host of real Christians, whether in the church or 
out have done all in their power to advance it. In- 
deed, there is no proof from our records that the word 
"Church" ever escaped the lips of Christ or any one 
of His eleven apostles. He and they were perpetually 
after a kingdom to surround the globe, as well as for- 
ever to rule the heavens. Until after the resurrection, 
even in the ist of Acts, they spoke of nothing else 



44 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

and thought of nothing else. The great apostacy of 
creed makers evidently admitted that book into their 
canon to enable them to transform Christ's kins^dom 
of the heavens into their puerile and despotic church. 
They might as well have tried to put all the stars into 
a leather bandbox; no Christ word even looks that 
way; Christ gave one and only one simple and effic- 
ient rale for all co-operative action in every good word 
and work. ^'For where two or three are g^athered 
together in my name, there am I in the midst of 
them." 

This rule is as good for millions as for units, and as 
binding over popes and deacons as fully as over any 
other disciples. 

Why not of yourselves judge ye what is right? — He 
cries out to them. What need of popes and priests 
and councils to proclaim false scripture canons and 
their own judgments upon them if the spirit of Christ, 
of truth, and of God is within every soul of you, to 
enlighten and guide you, wherever you meet or where - 
ever you part? If you have any work to do in Christ's 
name He will guide you, but if it is only in the name 
of the church you may need popes and church officers, 
for Christ may not be there. 

Now, forever, is the judgment of this world, and 
now, forever, is the day of salvation — He teaches us 
— now is the Son of Man glorified — where and when? 
Right before and right on the cross? But the St. Peter 
of the church evidently prefers to be glorified in his 
coach and six, and glorify other people who tell the 
truth on the cross. I have called you friends because 
"everything that I have heard of my father I have 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 45 

made known unto you." "I have finished the work 
which thou gavest me to do." What more then has 
the pope, the church and the creed makers to reveal 
to us? 

The very catch words and fundamental ideas of our 
creeds, such as Trinity, atonement, penalty, pardon, 
eternal punishment, eternal death, eternal decree, pre- 
destination, reprobation and probation, hell fire, or 
some place of unmingled evil, heaven as a place of 
unmingied good, etc., etc., are nowhere even alluded 
to in any true translation of our Christ words, and 
most of them are not found even in the whole of the 
pope's big Bible. So it would seem that Christ in 
* 'telling the disciples everything that He had heard of 
the Father," and in finishing up all that the Father 
had given Him to do, fell very far short of the high 
water mark of genuine papal orthodoxy, and even the 
whole Bible falls far short of sufficient sea room for 
the pope and the church. They ought to have canon- 
ized the entire whole of human literature of every sort. 
It takes o^reat room for bio^ fish to swim in. Our mere 
Christ word is too infinitely narrow. 

Self-evidently the scripture canon of Christ Him- 
self, and that of the pope and the church, are mutu- 
ally exclusive. If that of the pope is true, that of the 
Christ is utterly false from beginning to end, and vice 
versa. Indeed, if the pope's scripture canon is the 
true one, as presented in the creeds, Christ never 
uttered a single downright and completed truth from 
the beginning to the end of His life. It all needs 
supplementing or modifying, for Christ is every- 
where and always saying, ''Believe on me, my 



46 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

words, my voice, and no one else, as your only 
teacher of that truth which is to save you and all the 
worlds of God together." But the creeds are perpet- 
ually saying, "Believe on Christ as your scapegoat, 
but on the church and the creeds and our Bible as 
your only reliable teacher; never judge for yourselves, 
or hear and believe for yourselves, but let the church 
hear and believe and judge for you." The only dif- 
ference is that the issue of the one is an infinite free- 
dom to every human soul; that of the other an infinite 
despotism over every human soul. And I am wholly 
unable to conceive how Christ, should He come again 
on earth as a respectively honest man, could Himself 
subscribe to any creed I have ever seen or read. Still 
the spirit of truth, of Christ, and of God can and does 
get through the brick walls of our churches, and the 
investments of our creeds as readily as it did of yore 
through the stone temple walls, and barred prison 
gates, and the petrified dogmas of the old Jews, to 
give its own light and life to the world; and despite 
of crown and cowl, and of church and creed, this uni- 
versal spirit of truth and light in all ages and all 
churches alike has found its way to the heart of hearts 
of millions of men on earth. But it is the simple Christ 
word alone that reaches the heart, while the church 
word forever stops in the head — if, indeed, it can ever 
get that far — for in these days it seldom gets beyond 
the mouth. Hence we mouth our creeds, and pray 
our Christ words. For the Christ words alone can 
make a Christ man or a true disciple, while the church 
words alone can make nothing but a churchman. You 
might read the church creeds in the ears of men to 



IN ALL THE WOKLDS. 47 

the day of judgment, and if they were sensible men 
you would never convert a single soul to Christ. Read 
them or preach them in any real revival and they will 
operate only as a blast of dynamite. 

The great hope and glory of our age and country is 
that so many of our best preachers have done preach- 
ing: the creeds and the church words, and are so earn- 
estly striving to preach the Christ and the Christ 
words. In this great work we need the help of the 
agnostic, the spiritualist and the materialist, whether 
in the church or out of it, to help us retranslate the 
Christ word out of the old heathenism of the Jews, 
with which it never agreed, and into the real truth of 
to-day, with which it is ever in the fullest accord. 
For Christ Himself teaches us that nothing can any- 
where exist that has not in itself a three-fold aspect. 
That of the utterly unknowable, that of the truly spir- 
itual, and that of the wholly material. And no science 
or philosophy of man has as yet, or probably ever will, 
clearly define these inevitable three-fold aspects of 
all being, of which the material alone is open to the 
eye of sense; the unknowable and spiritual alone 
to the eye of reason. And the great philosopher ©f 
Judea is the only philosopher that ever put the world 
in the way of their true solution, as eighteen centuries 
of human experience now demonstrate. 

His words make no appeal to passion, custom, big- 
otry or fear. They are as purely rational and intel- 
lectual as are the axioms of geometry. He never 
mouths the world for God, or in God's name. Like 
all other true spiritual philosophers He declares His 
message to be the truth, and calls on all other men to 



48 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

realize and verify it for tliemselves by all the spirit- 
ual and physical philosophy within their reach. No 
true spiritual philosopher is, or ever can be opposed 
to Him. They simply mistake the incessant blare and 
blow of the church words for His calm and quiet dec- 
laration of that truth which is manifested by and ulti- 
mately controls everything that can exist on earth or 
in the heavens. Why all true spiritualists, whether 
in the church or out of it, do not at once rally around 
the greatest spiritual philosopher the world has ever 
seen, or why true physical philosophers should oppose 
Him, is quite inconceivable to me. Though why they 
oppose the anti-Christ church creeds I have for years 
quite well understood. 

All persons are at full liberty to come to the Christ 
word from any motive of interest or prudence or feel- 
ing or sympathy or taste which may chance to influ- 
ence them; but surely the Christ word alone can give 
them their true reason for coming, or tell them who 
or what they are to come to. "Come unto me, all ye 
that are weary and heavy laden, and / will give you 
rest. ' ' Not the Bible nor the pope nor the church nor 
tbe preacher, nor all of these combined, but simply 
and solely "I; my words, my voice, iny truth." 

If we can at all believe these last or any other of 
our real Christ words, the old ''Elohim" and Javah, 
the Almighty God of the Jews, the Jupiter of the 
Greeks and Romans, and the whole host of other gods 
and divinities were altogether utterly extinguished by 
the now revealed Father of all, as the new risen sun 
dispels all fogs and darkness and blots out all the 
stars. The rival almighty God and trinity of the 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 49 

church and the creeds, several centuries later was 
evolved wholly from the church words; not a single 
verifiable Christ word even looks toward him; neither 
in name, symbolism, character, spirit, law or method 
of administration does he in the least degree resemble 
Christ or his revealed Father. 

Forever seeking nothing but his own glory; swag- 
gering about with his decrees, his predestinations and 
reprobations and imputations of both good and evil, 
according to his own sweet will; his localized heaven 
of bliss and hell of eternal fire, into which he brushes 
whole worlds full of people more unscrupuously than 
men brush flies into the fire, because their progenitor 
ate a forbidden fruit; and saves not even the few from 
it except by some clap-trap of an atonement of which 
only he and his priests have ever even spoken; and 
they after fifteen hundred years of wrangling over it 
are now less agreed about it than ever before. 

This scarecrow of a God evolved wholly from the 
church or the church words is in no point of view any 
more like Christ and His Father, as revealed by his 
word, than is the devil himself, still his worshipers can- 
not be accused of violating Moses' second command- 
ment, for he is wholly unlike anything that ever ex- 
isted in the heaven above, or the earth beneath, or in 
the waters under the earth. For more than a thousand 
years he created all over Europe a hell of ignorance 
and despotism, which no civilization could endure; 
give him a chance and he would do the same thing 
here and now; yea, he would turn all heaven into the 
same sort of a hell if he could only get up there, which 
he never did and never will, for our good Father in 



50 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

the heavens forever checkmates, exposes and destroys 
all his schemes of despotism and evil as fast as He can 
consistently with entire human freedom. Oar creed 
makers, like other slaves of a despot, have for centu- 
ries tried in vain to cover up the utter rottenness of 
his pretensions by quoting eulogistic scrap texts, from 
here and there all over the pope's Bible; got together, 
collated, interpolated, canonized and translated in 
defiance of all our real Christ words to enable them to 
present this new God of the Bible as the only basis of 
their infernal despotism over the souls and bodies of 
men, which the true Father and the true Christ word 
everywhere rejects and repels with an abhorrence that 
is both infinite and eternal. 

Against this apostacy and devilhood of the papacy 
and the church, human souls, whether as individuals 
or nations, have no possible recourse except through 
an immediate return to the Christ word alone, and the 
tme woTsliip of His Father and our Father,' of His 
God and our God in spirit and in truth. 

The protestantism that has ceased to protest in be- 
half of the Christ words, is a watch dog that has 
ceased to breathe. His dead body is only in every- 
body's way, if it does not pollute the whole air around 
it. 

To be unfaithful toward any person, trust or inter- 
est, is to be infidel toward the same. In our age and 
land, if we are devoted to the dogmatic church and 
sect word, we must be infidel toward the Christ word, 
and vice versa. Here, as elsewhere, every man can, 
and must take his choice. We can no more serve 
Christ and a sect, than we can serve God and Mam- 



IN ALL THE WORLDS, 51 

mon. "By their fruits ye shall know them," said the 
teacher. Our best statisticians compute that in enforc- 
ing this scripture canon of the church and the sect, 
fifty millions of human beings have been destroyed by 
all sorts of tortures, massacres, murders, and wars, 
while no man even pretends that our commanded 
Christ word, and Scripture canon has ever harmed the 
hair of a man's head. Which shall we Americans 
elect? That on which our government is wholly based, 
or that which would certainly overthrow it? 



52 THE ONLY GOOD THING 



CHAPTER 111. 



god's commentaries. 



When a few of our old slave holders induced our 
Southern people to proclaim and herald for themselves 
a new political creed or constitution differing from our 
own only in some two or three marked particulars, we 
rose in arms at once almost to a man, to resist the out- 
rage. Yet, ever since the first great and universal 
apostasy of pagan Rome from the entire authorized 
Christ word, it has become fashionable and is, forsooth, 
deemed quite justifiable for any dozen or half dozen of 
scribes, pharisees or scriveners of whatever sort, to 
set up a church creed and constitvition of their own, 
and proclaim themselves and their creed to the world 
as a church of Christ ; till, at last, almost every 
strange, diabolical and incredible thing under heaven, 
has become sheltered and nursed and petted, under the 
name of Christianity ; and all sensible men are wisely 
beginning to enquire what Christianity really is ; 
whether it really is or is not anything that Christ him- 
self ever had anything to do with. It is this simple 
inquiry that we wish to help forward. 

As to the old Jewish religion, the first great antag- 
onist of the Christ word, the real acting and living 
God, whoever he may be, or under what name, soon 
saw fit to overthrow and demolish all their temples, 



IN ALL THE WOKLDS. 53 

synagogues and churches, leaving not one stone upon 
another, destroying and burning their cities with fire ; 
scattering their priest-hoods and peoples abroad as 
vagabonds, over all lands, and forever to render even 
the pretense of a real Jewish worship an utter impos- 
sibility upon the face of the earth. If the world at 
laro^e cannot understand which side of this controversy 
He was on, the Jews certainly can understand and ap- 
preciate it, and to this day they gain in respect and 
esteem of their fellow citizens only in proportion as 
they become in reality more christian than the pre- 
tended Christians round about them. 

I. 

God's commentaries on Christ's scripture canon are 
his eternal and ever present providences forever illu- 
minating the pathway of its truth toward peace on 
earth, good will to men and glory to God in the high- 
est, and eternally blockading all other wa3^s with wars 
and rumors of wars, pestilences and famines in divers 
places, blood and fire and vapor of smoke, covering- 
all the earth and darkening: all the skies. For the first 
three hundred years — a period three times as long as 
our republic has existed — with no Bibles, books or dic- 
tionaries, no churches, chapels, schools or monasteries, 
with no exclusive oflScial ministers or priests: hiding 
at first in the dens and caves of the earth, with no th- 
ins: but these naked Christ words, the successors of 
these bare-footed and everywhere persecuted disciples 
enthroned these simple Christ words in the hearts of 
the people far above the throne of the Caesars, and 



54 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

practically revolutionized the philosophies, faiths and 
empires of the globe. 

For these first long three hundreds years, neither 
Christ nor any one of his disciples ever heard or thought 
of a bible, or a bible God, a bible church, a bible gos- 
pel or a bible plan of salvation ; and no two men on 
earth can to-day agree as to what any one of these 
cant church words really means. All history shows us 
that we cannot subject these Christ words to any po- 
litical or ecclesiastical control — no more than we could 
the Christ himself — without exterminating them. Our 
verifiable Christ words never gave birth to a tyranny, 
a slavery, a sect, a falsehood or a crime on earth. 
Our canonized papal church words, books and creeds 
have ojiven birth to little or nothinoj else. How was 
it possible for even God himself more thoroughly to 
endorse this Christ word than He has done ? 

This is commentary number one. Is it not suffi- 
ciently explicit and distinct? 
« 

n. 

But to keep their heathen priests andpontifex max- 
imus in power, and their heathen temples and priest- 
hoods in use, the rollicking and rowdy rulers of the 
empire undertook to organize, arm and equip, and 
use to their own aims, ends and purposes this invisible 
and ever-present power of God and of Christ. They 
might as well have undertaken to organize and control 
gravity and sunlight; the Roman Empire fostering 
God ! their old pontifex maximus impersonating God! 
Just think of it ! 

They gave it a lease of all their old heathen temples 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 55 

and priest-hoods; they selected and canonized that 
miscellaneous pile of church words we call the Bible, 
instead of our simple Christ words. They have been 
expounding them ever since, and the more they ex- 
pound them the less is known about them. They 
dressed up the old bare-footed Peter in silk and scar- 
let, furnished him with a coach and six, with outriders 
and heralds, and all hats off and all knees bowing 
wherever he passed, giving him despotic authority to 
tax all men born into the world: and the right of taxing 
their descendants to get them out of hell after they were 
dead; until that gospel which was given without 
money and without price became the most diabolical 
despotism above ground, darkening all the skies, ex- 
tino^uishino: all civilization, and well nio^h extinojuish- 
in Of human nature itself. 

Here, of course, God wrote his commentaries in 
wars and rumors of wars, blood and fire and vapor of 
smoke. He raised up the Saracen on the south to 
burn their temples and Bibles, and with his sharp 
scimetar to hew down their priests and churchmen 
and feed them to the doo^s over half of the o-reat and 
renowned empire of Rome. He sent down the Goth 
and the Vandal from the North, with their huge iron 
swords and battle axes, to knock great holes in their 
churches and temples and lay waste their cities and 
fields. Thus tidino^s out of the North and tidino^s out of 
the South troubled them. 

This was God's Commentary number two. 

This insane contest after despotic and military pow- 
er kept all Europe in warfare with the Saracens on 
the East and South and the heretics on the North, as 



56 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

long as the papacy could make any pretense to civil 
power, and will do so as long as it is allowed to finger 
and fumble in civil affairs. 

III. 

From the old home of the Goths and Vandals there 
arose a valiant monk, Martin Luther, who challenged 
the papacy on its priest-hoods and dogmas. The strife 
of words that arose was widespread and intense; 
neither party proposed or even allowed any real return 
to the Christ words, although both parties alike pro- 
fessed to hold to them. God's commentary on this 
unequal strife over dogmas was a thirty years' solid 
war which desolated the lands of all parties alike, but 
gave birth to the new Protestant power which has ever 
since held in check and humbled the pride and arro- 
gance of the papacy. 

In these darkest ages one hundred and seventy years 
before Luther, some unknown old monk wrote the 
book called ''Germanic Theology" to which Luther 
said he owed more than to all other books, save the 
bible. It explains and enforces our Christ words 
more radically, when fully translated into scientific 
English, than even our Lutherism would tolerate to- 
day. So little did the spirit of God and of Christ 
heed or care for church authorities even in these direful 
times. The unknown man in the unknown monastery, 
despite crown or cowl, still spake and taught with 
the voice of Him, forever known of all men, w^hich 
enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world. 
But even in our day all Europe is little else than an 
armed camp of checkmated states and churches, of 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 57 

intermingled Protestants and Catholics, holding each 
other at bay over dogmas and creeds that if the Christ 
of God ever heard of he surely never spake of. 

The entire resources of the people are to-day de- 
pleted and exhausted by churchmen and schoolmen, 
aristocracies and armies, encamped around church and 
state, and holding all their retainers as slaves of the 
dogma instead of as freemen of the Lord; ever ready 
to "cry havoc and to let slip the dogs of war," or to 
send to heathen lands their strano^e admixtures of ofrace 
and gunpowder, cannon balls and creeds, bibles and 
bombshells as the necessities of interest and policy may 
dictate. While to -day no single word exists in all our 
Christ words upon which any arrogant or domineering 
power of any church, sect or state can possibly be 
erected over any man — however humble — on the face 
of the whole wide earth. ' 'If the Son of Man make 
you free ye shall be free indeed." This is God's pres- 
ent commentary on the value of the dogma. 

IV. 

From all these insolent oppressions our barefooted 
forefathers fled to this new, wild and savage land. In 
time they so far recovered their sense of the Christ 
words as to struggle to break away from the state and 
church policies of the old world. 

God's running commentary on that struggle was to 
give a few barefooted farmers the victory over the 
mightiest and ablest commercial and naval power of the 
£:lobe. In due time, learnino^ more and more of the true 
spirit of the Christ words, our fathers desired a stronger 
union^ a hroader freedom and a more permanently 

5 



58 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

secured peace. Their great Revolutionary leaders' 
minds were directed to the simple Christ words, and 
when they appointed Mr. Jefferson to make their de- 
claration to the world, God inspired him, though not 
a church professor of any sort, with his own hand to 
copy all of our Christ words out of the gospels, which 
he studied daily, until imbued with their spirit, and 
embodied all their vital essentials of life, liberty and 
fraternity in that great declaration which they threw 
out to the world; which, as of old, impressed the whole 
world as a voice out of the sky. On the basis of 
which they also framed our civil constitution, and 
founded this, the first great empire of free states on 
earth that ever pretended to be based on the Christ 
words, or ever fulfilled the old prophecy of "a nation 
born in a day' ' as all the world now knows. So plain 
is this that Rabbi Solomon Schinder, of Boston, who 
utterly ignores Christ, in his lecture to his synagogue 
of Jews declares Mr. Jefferson as the Messiah of the 
Jews. This unparalleled republic and its daily in- 
creasing influence and power over all the wide world 
is God's running commentary on their act, known and 
read of all men. But even they tripped and slipped 
a little; they seemed to themselves necessitated to 
tolorate the alleged Bible dogma of slavery, at least 
for a time, by a sort of indirection they were them- 
selves ashamed to confess. 

As a running commentary on this great fault, God 
gave us five years of the most direful civil war ever 
waged on earth, with a loss of half a million of lives, 
a whole million of crippled men, and some ten thousand 
millions of wealth, as all living men now know, till 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 59 

the entire infamy was wiped out in blood from the 
statute books. 

His running commentary on our present condition 
seems to be read in o-ivino^ us the broadest freedom, 
the most profound peace, the strongest union and the 
most widespread well-being ever given to any people 
on the face of the earth. Has God blundered from 
first to last in the scripture canon he gave us in the 
Christ words, or in the providential running commen- 
tary he has written with his own hand from age to age 
in the interpretation thereof? Who shall say it? 
Who shall add to it or take from it ? Can states, em- 
pires, popes, priests and councils, churches and sects, 
or the whole wide' world combined? How futile! they 
are all but the dust of the balance, the chaff which the 
wind driveth away. 

Some good people are anxiously enquiring how we 
can o^et God into our constitution. It would be more 
pertinent to enquire how we can get him out of it, for 
he has been all there, is of it and in it from the start. 

To-day all the immense wealth of our cities encir- 
cling our continent and scattered along nearly ten 
thousand miles of coast are open to any invader as to 
the sea itself. Not a soldier in them! scarcely a gun! 
Who or what is our defender outside of that truth and 
righteousness which our barefooted philosopher eight- 
een hundred years ago declared the only sure defence 
of nations as well as of men? 

We are still adding empires to our domains; build- 
ing cities in the desert in a year, aye, even in a day. 

In what school have we learned all these mysteries 
of our mighty arts and industries? Has it been in 



60 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

that of the church words on which all older states and 
empires have relied, or in the school of the Christ 
words on which we alone have relied? 

Our Christ philosophy, given us in our simple and 
marvelous Christ words, gathers up into itself all of 
law and religion, all of life, health, duty and destiny, 
in the past or in the future, in the Old Testament or 
in the New, leaving all other utterances merely illus- 
trative, or expository, or wholly superfluous, becom- 
ing itself at once the basis, the defense, the test and 
the measure of all other truth, and will be so under- 
stood — when it comes to be understood as it is plainly 
written. 

Christ himself is either Lord of all peoples, Bibles 
and books, as well as of Sabbaths, as He everywhere 
claims, or He is nothing worth minding nor are we our- 
selves worth minding. 

Whether that voice from heaven was fact or fiction, 
its import is unquestionable. It designated one man 
and one voice alone; that same voice speaks to-day out 
of the same sky to all truly American ears with a force 
and weight of eighteen centuries of truth, bearing it 
down upon them as it could not have done to any Jews 
or Gentiles of olden times. Having ears shall we not 
hear, having eyes shall we not see because we muflile 
them both in our creeds? 

In speaking of the Christ words, of course we do not 
believe that Christ ever uttered that strange and self- 
evidently absurd ''Peter Rock Text," interpolated 
into the XVI of Matthew, as we have elsewhere 
shown : 

1. Because it is at utter discord in style, thought, 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 61 

word and spirit with all that Christ ever said or Mat- 
thew ever wrote. 

2. Because it is utterly unknown and unrecognized 
by Paul or Peter or any other apostle or Bible writer. 

3. It practically contradicts and overthrows nearly 
all that Christ ever said or Matthew ever wrote. 

4. Because Christ exalts Peter's power into the 
heavens above all power He claimed for Himself to 
an entire equality with God; telling him at the same 
time that he was a Satan and a fool and knew nothing 
about the matter. While he told the mother of James 
and John that He had no right to exalt any one, even 
to His own rioht hand, but that all such rights the 
Father had reserved to Himself alone. 

5. It is to-day, and forever has been, the sole basis 
of all the worst dogmas and despotisms the Christian 
ages have ever seen. It cannot, therefore, be accepted 
simply because we find it written in the Greek; hardly 
would a dozen voices out of the sky in this our 
own age make it credible to any rational man; for that 
such an element of revolutionary mischief should have 
escaped the notice or comment of all other Bible 
writers is wholly incredible. If the interpolaters 
make it stick fast in the Greek, it hangs on mere wind 
everywhere else. It was comparatively easy to get it 
in, although it may take a thousand years to get it 
out, since all official power from the pope down to the 
lowest scribe, has through all time hung on this 
pretended Christ word alone. But we can interpret it, 
to be sure we can, or anything else. But what does our 
re-interpretation amount to after one thousand years of 
unutterable mischief ? Each and all of our Christ words 



62 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

are to be tested and determined by that reason God 
has given every human soul, and impressed upon all 
that exists, and nowhere and never by simple piles of 
verbiage, whether Hebrew, Greek or English, inspired 
or uninspired. 

To believe or do anything whatever in Christ's 
name, as He so often insists, can only mean that 
we believe and act as He Himself teaches us: — if the 
words have any meaning beyond the merest cant. 
Even our church words admit that the name or author- 
ity of Christ is the only name under heaven whereby 
we must be saved. Yet dogmas, reiterated for thous- 
ands of years with unquestioned acquiescence, deliv- 
ered from sources wholly apart from the Christ words, 
have the effect of re-interpreting the Christ words 
themselves almost in spite of the reader. 

If, for example, Christ really knew, while uttering 
His instructions to the race, that the true philosophy 
of God and human well-being was anything like that 
given us in papal and church creeds and practices, He 
was, in fact, the most misleading, unreliable teacher 
the world has ever known. To test this at any single 
point, set the real Christ words face to face with our 
papal church orthodoxies and practices; to bring them 
into any sort of accord, the one or the other must be 
revolutionized from beo:innino: to end; for two contra- 
dictory philosophies and theories cannot co-exist. For 
example : Christ everywhere speaks of His kingdom 
of the heavens and eternal life and all that relates to 
it, in the present tense, as here and now, forever right 
about us and within us. The church kingdom of 
heaven and eternal life is away beyond the grave. 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 63 

above the stars, no one really knoAVS where or what, 
or can verify it by any possible facts or truths. Ac- 
cording to our strictest orthodoxy Christ ought to have 
said to Nicodemus, "He that believeth on me (as 
his scape goat, and on the church and sect as his 
teacher) shall have (beyond the grave and beyond the 
stars) eternal life." But that is almost the exact op- 
posite of what He did say and of what Nicodemus must 
have honestly understood Him to say. See John v, 24. 
So in hundreds of other texts. Neither Christ nor 
Paul ever said or intimated that He died in our place 
or in our stead (as dogmatism asserts) but always and 
everywhere '•'■huper humon^'''' in our behalf, for our 
good. 

Take the proof text of any creed in Christendom and 
simply underscore all the authorized Christ words it 
quotes, and you will see at once, if you reflect, that 
the Christ words are hitched on as mere tags to their 
ready-made bundles of Church orthodoxies. 

Does it strike one as strange that our apparently 
authorized Christ words need expurgation ? What did 
that old papal ecclesiastical apostacy ever touch, taste 
or smell, that does not need expurgation ? Yet, under 
it millions of men and women were saved by the ever- 
present Spirit of God and of Christ — in spite of both 
its Church and its Bible — and by our Christ word 
alone ; as we, too, must be, if ever saved at all. 

Our books of Matthew and John have given us the 
only Christ words the world holds to-day authorized, 
even apparently, by Christ Himself. All other books 
are mere church words, collected, super-imposed and 
indorsed by the church alone; never by a single truly 



64 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

translated Christ word. The Bible, as a whole, when 
read, translated, used and applied in entire subjection 
to our authorized Christ words, is, indeed, the best of 
all books; but when by a pretended scripture analogy, 
these church words became exalted to any sort of a 
level with our Christ words, such an utter abuse of 
the Bible may make it, and has made it, the very 
worst of all possible books. 

It costs the world more labor, time, thought, money 
and agonism of sophistical debate, every year, to de- 
fend its own creeds, dogmas and church words than 
would be needed to carry the real Christ word round 
and round the globe a thousand years. 

The world holds no scrap of proof to-day that any 
such idea as we attach to the words ' ' Bible ' ' and 
"Church" ever entared the mind of Christ, or if so. 
He never uttered it. What He really thought of papacy 
and priesthoods, of mere church words and orthodox- 
ies, He very plainly tells us in the XXIH of Matthew, 
and indeed everywhere else. 

Until we admit that this Son of Man is the sole Lord 
indeed, both of the church and of the Bible, we can 
learn nothing worth learning from either. Our best 
preachers and teachers and church members to-day, 
and all our best people are heroically struggling to get 
out from under the huge straw piles of our papacies 
and orthodoxies, as fast as they can, and to come 
nearer and nearer to our real Christ words. It is, in- 
deed, a herculean task in which all living men 
should be at once patient and heroic. For in this re- 
creation of a new heaven and a new earth, a thousand 



IN ALL THE WOKLDS. 65 

years is not even a single day. It is only one single 
tick of the gre^t clock-work of the eternal years. 

If we treat these two seemingly authorized books of 
Matthew and John as all other books must be treated, 
submitted to intelligent creatures; if we strip them of 
the immense piles of superimposed church words with 
which papacies and sects have blockaded their pro- 
gress throuo'h the world, and of all their self-evident 
and contradictory interpolations; if thus cleared up 
and cleaned up, as all possible books and hjiman 
knowledge must be; if we read, translate, and inter- 
pret them with most rigorous accuracy, giving to 
every affirmation and negation, every word and letter, 
every article and particle, every gender, number and 
person, every mood and tense, its full and entire im- 
port, as it must have been understood at the time of 
utterance — without the least attempt in any way to 
doctor it up into a church orthodoxy, or into accord 
with any other books or dogmas now extant, if we, 
then, analyze and weigh, and consider every word and 
thought they contain, till we reach the bottom of their 
entire import, beginning where he begins and stopping 
where he stops, we shall find that these most simple 
and most marvelous Christ words embrace and neces- 
sitate a philosophy broader, deeper and higher than 
the wit of man has yet devised or proposed; that they 
are the sole protection and safeguard of all other sci- 
ences; and that no science exists to-day or ever has 
existed worthy of the name outside of the limits of 
their protecting power. A law both of human duty 
and destiny more scientifically, philosophically accu- 
rate, complete and universal, than Moses or all the 



^6 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

Jews, than Greeks and Romans, and all the Gentiles 
had ever before dreamed of on earth : a gospel which 
Paul truthfully describes as of the wisdom of God and 
the power of God to salvation to every one who be- 
lieves it, first to the Jew, then to the Gentile; in what- 
ever place, condition or world he may be found. 

Our Christ words were first heralded and given to 
the world as an eternal optimism of union in freedom. 
They were so. overwhelmed and interpolated with 
church words as to be sunk into an eternal pessim- 
ism of despotism and sectarianism. It is our business 
to get out of that. 

There never was an age in which both believers and 
unbelievers had so firm a hold of these Christ words as 
they have in this present age ; or one in which they so 
readily sloughed off all other orthodoxies, theories, 
heresies and fetiches and left them to perish by the 
way. Especially is this true of our best preachers and 
statesmen of all parties and sects. 

Nature and its demonstrated phenomena, God, and 
His demonstrating revealer, ''the truth" — the ever- 
present kingdom of the heavens, the spirit of God in 
Christ and in all the good, forever in all, over all, and 
through all that, can exist ; these three will forever 
march hand in hand, down all the ages, through all 
languages and peoples, all books. Bibles, creeds and 
churches; or if need be, in spite of them, to the eternal 
consummation of all the ages. 

All the false and foolish things we may say, or do, 
or institute, will not vary their course the tithing of a 
hair; while all the true and good things we may say 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 67 

or do, will forever live to bless ourselves and all who 
may come after us. 

There is in the whole Bible no truly translated book 
or text that claims either inspiration or infallibility for 
itself or for any other book or text; if so, where is it? 
As state and municipal education is vastly more 
broadly and scientifically in accord with the Christ 
word and with all the great needs of the people, more 
universal, flexible, and economical than any sectarian 
or private scheme can possibly be, we have for a long 
time believed in that alone, leaving all other methods 
free and open for those who choose to pay for them. 
All power of taxation for schools, and all right of 
determining their uses is vested in the majority of our 
people as a whole. Whenever they concede this trust 
to the power of the pope or to any 'despotism abroad, or 
to any rival sects or corporations at home, whether 
relio^ious or irrelis^ious, the schools will be worse than 
useless, and the republic will soon be done with. 

Creation, and Being itself, according to these Christ 
words, are an eternal logos, logic, law and reason of 
God, forever talkino- to his creatures throuo:h all that 
can exist, in that ever-present, silent, indisputable 
sign language, which enlighteneth every man that 
cometh into the world, and which is the sole basis and 
essential of all truth and reason, of all law and duty, 
of all faith and belief, of all science and philosophy, of 
all arts and industries, of all health and best well- 
being in body, soul and life, and therefore most emi- 
nently fit to be taught in all our American schools, and, 
indeed, in all schools of earth and time. But accord- 
ing to our church words any attempt at real reason 



68 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

deserves the wrath and curse of God here, and the 
pains of hell hereafter. 

All these corruptions and apostacies toward dress 
parades and disasters, began and have continued when- 
ever and wherever any sort of divine authority of per- 
sons, places and teachings have been recognized by 
men, apart from that sole voice out of the sk}^, given 
to us only in our authorized Christ words, with its 
promised spirit of God and of Christ in every human 
soul; demonstrating from age to age that in that alone 
there is logos, law, liberty and salvation for all who 
will ever dwell on the earth. While off from these, 
as is everywhere found, is nothing but universal doubt, 
division, sectarism, disaster, despotism, anarchy and 
ultimate despair for all that live, in whatever pretended 
church or state. 

God has never for one moment forsaken His only 
full-born Son, either in life or in death, or at any 
moment since that time, as we may see by reading 
the triumphant close of the 22nd Psalm, at the time 
of the crucifixion in all their minds; and which Christ, 
when too weak to do more, simply according to their 
custom, lined off to them, of course implying the 
whole psalm, showing that He was then and there in 
spirit consciously triumphing not only over all death 
and disaster, as David did of old, but as Paul declares, 
over death and hell itself ; as we all shall also do, if 
we in spirit follow Him alone and His truth and right 
to their end, however bitter. This benign and unfalter- 
ing trust in God, in such an hour of despair, so im- 
pressed the bystanders that they exclaimed : ' ' Truly 
this was the Son of God." Did God in spirit really 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 69 

forsake his Son? How then do we know that He 
will not forsake us in the time of our disaster? Even 
David, in his early day, knew better than that, as he 
sung ' 'when my father and mother forsake me, then 
the Lord will take me up." 

About the close of the second century the immense 
and hideous pretensions of mere learning, the dress 
parades of rank and wealth, the cant and hypocrisies 
of mere dogmatic professions, began to creep into the 
so-called church, and as far as they could reach, to 
expel the promised, ever-present spirit of God and of 
Christ and to exterminate their real kingdom of the 
heavens, till at last in the Saracen age the Pope him- 
self is said to have sat on a double bottomed chair, the 
one dedicated to the triune God, and underneath it 
another dedicated to Allah and his prophet, ready to 
be placed on top whenever the Saracen should tri- 
umph; and the church itself had become the torturer 
and the murderer of all truly honest men. What do 
we, as Americans, or as Christians, want of an apos- 
tasy like this! But despite of all its pessimistic tyran- 
nies and that of all the ill-starred sects and dogmas that 
have sprung out of it, it is as natural to man to wor- 
ship God and hope for immortality as it is to eat bread 
and drink wine; if they can only be allowed a decent 
God to believe in and a decent immortality to hope 
for, which Christ alone, of all teachers born into the 
world, has truly, rationally and gratuitously given us 
as the rich and eternal patrimony and heritage from 
his Father and our Father, his God and our God. 



TO THE ONLY GOOD THING 



CHAPTER IV. 

AUTHORIZED BOOKS. 

Preliminary Note. 

Bayard Taylor, on his return from Arabia, some 
years ago, told me he found in those Idumean moun- 
tains, near where the author of the book of Job is sup- 
posed to have lived, a tribe of Arabian people who still 
retained all the old primitive modes and habits of life, 
of speech, thought and action which they inherited 
from their old Abrahamic fathers, particularly with 
regard to their modes of speech. They still thorough- 
ly believed in the Old Testament doctrine of inspira- 
tion, as defined by Job, and as is expressed in some 
of our older creeds; viz: that God Himself directly, 
spiritually inspired them to know, think, believe and 
do all the good and true things that they ever do be- 
lieve, know, think or do, and they did not express 
this in any abstract proposition, but in their hourly 
life and conduct, and habits of speech, as did their 
fathers before them. Instead of saying ''I believe, I 
think, this that and the other," they would say, ''God 
has told me this, that and the other; God met me this 
morning, or yesterday, or in some day past, and said 
so-and-so to me, or He appeared to me in such-and-such 
a place, and under such-and-such conditions, and told 
me or commanded me to do this or that." And this 



IX ALL THE AVOKLDS. 71 

personilied and dramatized mode of speech meant no 
more to them, and seemed no more strange to them 
than ours does to us, when we say "I sincerely believe 
or think this, that or the other." For they were in 
the habit of usins^ it daily about all sorts of aifairs 
and interests of any importance to them. 

There may be a question as to which of the two modes 
of speech, theirs or ours, is most profoundly philo- 
sophical and religious, but there can be no question 
that either party is bound to accept the thoughts of 
the other, whether expressed abstractly or dramatical- 
ly, without a further examination, nor do they hold it 
so. For each man still insists on revising what God 
has said to his neighbors by what God has said to 
himself, as Christ rightly did in the case of Moses 
and of all the old Jews: and it has now turned out to 
us as clear as daylight that He was always philosophical- 
ly in the right whenever they were philosophical- 
ly in the wrong, and their methods of dramatizing 
their speech makes not the slightest difference with its 
weight and importance, and any pretended monopoly 
of the inspiration of the world is worse than a pre- 
tended monopoly of its wealth. 



Canon Farrar, the great authority of the English 
church, years ago, most solemnly said to all English 
speaking peoples that the words ' 'hell, ' ' ' 'damnation, ' ' 
and "everlasting" never had any business in our En- 
glish Bible, and ought to be at once expurgated from 
it. This simple correction, not to mention scores of 
others equally necessary, would annihilate every creed 



72 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

and scheme of church theology the papacy and its 
heirs-at-law have ever concocted. 

The apostate dogmas of inspiration^ by which the 
church in the third and fourth centuries annihilated 
the authority of the Christ word by their monstrous 
inflation into it of this church word, utterly contradicts 
the only defination given to the world in their super- 
imposed Bible and all the undoctored texts in it which 
refer to the subject. The old time prophesy did not 
promise that God would pOur out His spirit on all 
licensed preachers, but on '-Hill jlesli^^ whether of men 
or of women. This substitution of wind for rock is 
the sole basis of their apostate scheme; but, according 
to the Christ word, inspiration can no more be monop- 
olized by pet men and pet books than can sunlight and 
air and universal vision. This entire revolution of 
authority was in effect like declaring the entire whole 
of American history a co-equal and co-ordinate part 
of the proclaimed Constitution of the United States; 
making the entire whole of it a mere devilhood of con- 
fusion, myths, and tyrannies which no power on earth 
could resolve except some church tyranny appointed 
for the purpose. Is this the freedom wherewith Christ 
hath made us free? ^'^ Credat Judeas,^^ but no sane 
Jew ever did or ever will believe it. 

The only books in the Bible or now in the world, 
^'according to scripture," that even pretend to have 
any authority from Christ Himself are the two simple 
narratives of Matthew and John, neither of which pre- 
tends to any other inspiration than the simple fact 
that they had seen and heard the Lord, the sole, true 
revealer of God, the Father of all, and of His kingdom 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 73 

of the heavens, and Himself the sole Jcurios^ curator, 
caretaker, leader, and teacher of all His children here 
on earth, their elder brother, the only true and full- 
born Son of Man; and, therefore, a true Son of God, 
nowhere and never a mere scape-goat of the great 
apostacy. When expurgated from all the super-im- 
posed rubbish of the church word, all their self 
evident interpolations and mis-translations, and 
left to tell their own simple story, they are 
themselves miracles of divine utterance with an 
inherent divine power of reason and of truth in 
themselves, infinitely surpassing all the real or 
pretended myths and miracles of the church word, be- 
cause verifiable, step by step, by every thing that ex- 
ists, here and now to-day, more clearly than they ever 
could have been in Old Rome or Judea. These reported 
and commanded Christ words from their first word 
to their last, professed to be based solely on ever-be- 
ing reason, truth, and life, and verifiable by these 
alone, and never by Old Testaments or New Testa- 
ments, old books or new books, no more than are our 
axioms of geometry or astronomy. "I tell you the 
truth. Try it and test it to the uttermost and you 
will find it so in the end, and if you do not so test it, it 
can do you no good. ' ' There is no other dress-parade 
or pretence about it from beginning to end. What 
does our wide world hold to-day more fair, less theo- 
logical, or more thoroughly scientific and philosophi- 
cal, and yet how marvelously brief, simple, clear, and 
direct to the point is its every utterance? Yet our 
scholastic churchmen think they must hunt through 
the Old Testament and the New to get proof of the 



74 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

Christ words, instead of taking Him at His word, and 
trying His words by all there is in themselves and 
round about themselves. This is just like thinking 
that we must hunt through the cellar for a couple of 
tallow candles to see the sun by. The sole declared 
basis of each of these books is ever -being reason and 
truth; all of which is dumped down at our feet in a 
Latinized pile of mere verbiage by the perverse skill 
of translators who want nothing but mere words to 
deal with, for these can be shaped to meet any possible 
emergency, but real things and facts, reasons and 
truths, are more perverse and impossible of manipula- 
tion. 

The book of Matthew is the only book in the world 
that even pretends to give us any sort of an ideal or 
basis or outline of any sort of an instituted kingdom, 
state, church or school on Christ's authority. John, 
like his beloved teacher, was throughout a natural 
born philosopher; neither of them could think or talk, 
only in the lines of the severest reason. And, as soon 
as they met, they seem, like kindred drops, to have 
melted into one. The book of John is the only book 
extant which gives us any clear insight into the depths 
of His most profound, moral, spiritual, and social 
philosophy. In Matthew He first proclaimed and 
briefly elucidated all the essential truths of His king- 
dom in His own words, as He himself explicitly de- 
clares. In Matthew X He commissioned and com- 
manded them to proclaim and preach as gospel to the 
world only what they had then heard from him in the 
ear, briefly explaining the inevitable effects of such 
preaching upon themselves and upon the world; and 



IN ALL THE WOKLDS. 75 

here, we are told, He made an end of commanding 
His disciples what to proclaim in His name. Hence 
all Matthew's historic incidents, narrations, events, 
and personal opinions, whether about fulfilled proph- 
esies, parables, miracles, His manner of life. His in- 
cidental conversations. His birth. His pedigree, or His 
death; are altogether ruled out and stand at best only 
as mere illustrations of the special things they were 
commanded to teach as gospel in His name. The book 
of Matthew had not then been written, and no one of 
them ever pretended that he had ever heard in the ear 
anyone of these incidental and illustrative things pro- 
clahned by Him as any part of the gospel He com- 
manded them to preach; no more than the varied 
incidents of the life of Washington form a part of the 
Constitution of the United States, though useful and 
illustrative of it in the highest degree. Then, just as 
here and now, ever-being proclaimed laAv was one 
thino- while its infinite illustrations, either real or im- 
aginary, were wholly another thing. What should we 
say of the court or Congress which assumed to make 
out its Constitutional law for itself by its own infer- 
ences from scrap texts taken from the general lives of 
its founders? If we had no record at all, we could not 
believe that Christ was a mere story teller who really 
founded and instituted nothing whatever in His own 
name; but, with such an explicit record before us, it 
is the extreme of idiocy and audacity to even pretend 
it. Grant, if you please, that He picked up all His 
items of truth from the ages before Him; all the bet- 
ter, for the more certain it is, they will again prove 
true in this final trial, as they have already done now 



76 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

for almost two thousand years, in spite of both state 
and church and school and fool, and all they could set 
in array against it. Surely a greater than Solomon 
and all the kings and prophets and all the apostles and 
churchmen put together was here, and we feel and 
know it as we read, if we read the text as it was orig- 
inally written. We do not need Moses or the proph- 
ets nor Peter nor Paul, and least of all the Pope and 
the church to help us out. But according to Matthew, 
this Son of Man appeared after His death to these 
eleven disciples, not to command them what to preach 
as gospel in His name, but yet again to charge them 
to scientifically teach to the nations only what He had 
already commanded them, and to baptize all who 
desired to learn of Him into those truths alone, not as 
showcase Christians or sectarians of any sort, but sim- 
ply as persons desiring to learn of Him and to follow 
Him and Him alone. Neither the book of Matthew, 
nor any other gospel book, good or bad, was at this 
time written, nor was there then, or for a long time 
after, any book, Bible, or creed, or tradition, or pro- 
claimed kingdom, or church or sect which it was pos- 
sible to teach to the nations as the rational ground of 
their baptism into Christ. Probably at each of these 
several junctures of proclaiming, commanding and re- 
charging His disciples, as regards what they were to 
proclaim, preach and teach as gospel to the nations, 
Christ Himself knew quite as well how much of the 
Jews' Old Testament and of the Apostles' New Test- 
ament He desired to have preserved and re-indorsed 
as a co-ordinate part of the foundation of His new 
Kingdom of the Heavens, quite as well, I say, as did 



j 



' IX ALL THE WOKLDS. 77 

the old despots of Rome in the fourth century, or as 
any of our churchmen have known since that day; just 
as well and just as clearly as our George Washington 
knew what he had signed and what he had not signed 
as the future Constitutional laio of the United States, 
iY^^//" based wholly on these commanded Christ words, 
and, in no part or item, upon any of the rejected 
church Avords; not because these are necessarily untrue, 
but because from their very nature they have nothing 
to do with universal law, whether on earth or in the 
heavens, except as mere illustrations, whether that 
law be applied to kingdoms, states, churches or 
schools, or individual men and women. And any law 
based on any other ground than that of the pure Christ 
word has uniformly proved itself, not a gospel or a 
God spell or a good spell or word, but a devil spell 
and a bad one. What have the number of devils that 
are said to have come out of some tomb or the number 
of swine that are said to have rushed into some sea, in 
olden time, to do with an ever-being law like this? 
Clearly no more than they have to do with the proces- 
sion of the Equinoxes or the revolutions of the spheres 
or the calculation of eclipses. ' ' Ye fools, blind 
guides," exclaimed the great teacher, ''which strain 
out the £:nat and swallow the camel: that stone all 
your living prophets, and build sepulchres for the 
dead ones; which compass sea and land to make one 
proselyte, only to make him two fold more the child 
of Gehenna than yourselves." 

The writer of the fifth chapter of the apocalypse 
describes a little sealed book as taken by Christ out of 
the hands of the Father and opened to the world, pro- 



78 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

ducing the most surprising results on every creature 
on earth and in the heavens. 

Now there never was a book on earth to which such 
results could possibly be referred but this only one 
Proclamation of the Kingdom of the Heavens in Mat- 
thew's gospel. The annihilation of this Kingdom, by 
substitutino^ for it the humbuo^eries and dos^mas of the 
Pope's apostate Bible and church, had not at that 
time even begun. 

All the symbolisms of the Christ word are as purely 
simple and natural as are ours in the science and phi- 
losophy of to-day; but in the third and fourth centu- 
ries, when the increasing pride and power of the old 
churchmen set them to the task of baptizing their old 
heathenisms and despotisms into this new-born king- 
dom, they needed a wholly new symbolism as well as 
a new gospel. In place of the universal, plain, and 
simple Father of all as the symbol of God, "His Father 
and our Father, His God and our God, ' ' they substi- 
tuted their heathen monstrosity of the trinity, a sort 
of triplet of Siamese twins, three persons in one God; 
with all their necessary heathen equipments, heathen 
laws of brute force, heathen sacrifices, altars, churches, 
temples, officials, courts, judgment days, and atone- 
ments; and, as a final retribution, a near by, under 
ground, heathen hell, paved with eternal fire for the 
vast multitude of unbelievers in their dogmas; and, far 
away above the stars, a heathen heaven paved with 
gold and walled with sapphire for the sainted few who 
are predestined to believe. True, their symbol of God 
could not be condemned by the law of Moses for it 
was wholly unlike anything that ever existed in heaven 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 79 

above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under 
the earth, and not a single truly translated Christ word 
ever looked either towards it or towards the heathen 
paraphernalia and equipments attending it; but, in as- 
signing their several parts to this queer divinity which 
each one was to enact in their newly resurrected 
heathenism, Christ was to be the full equal with God, 
"M^ very God of very God^ Of course this was di- 
rectly contrary to all He had ever said or taught about 
Himself; but, allowing it to be true, one cannot help 
wondering how it happened that He did not truly know 
some things about Himself, His own purpose, nature, 
aims, and ends, what He ought to teach and what not, 
and what He ought to command His disciples to teach 
in His name, what sort of a kingdom, if any. He 
wanted to set up in the world, what were and what 
were not its fundamental truths, ordinances, institu- 
tions, officers, teachers, retinues, and revenues, if any, 
what confessions, professions, and duties and beliefs 
it required, what manuscripts, books, and creeds, of 
the past or of the future, He ought to indorse and 
commend. He ought to have known also somewhat 
about His Father by whose spirit He pretended to be 
actuated in all that He said or did, whether He is one 
person or three, whether He is super-naturally en- 
throned, heathen-fashion, somewhere away above the 
stars, or whether His spirit is forever immanent; fully 
and perpetually manifested in Christ's own soul and 
in all other sane souls, in proportion as they become 
truly wise and good; and in and through all other 
beings and things according to their nature. His King- 
dom too, is it a power outside of everything, or, like 



80 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

gravity, a power concentrated in everything, great or 
small, whose cenfi^e is therefore everywhere and its 
circumference nowhere, so far as we can know ? One 
would have thought that "the very God of very God" 
must have known somewhat of all these things, and 
that he might have been trusted to speak of them in 
His own plain and simple language without the aid or 
advice or supervision or domination of old Roman 
monks and politicians. Here is a mighty mystery of 
the trinity, indeed! which the church has never fully 
expounded to us. I know they tell us it pleased God 
to do so-and-so; but, if it ever pleased God to do all 
the foolish and diabolical things their creeds and the- 
ologies ascribe to Him, we can never have any use for 
Him in this world, or any hope of Him in the next; 
but all these absurdities come from our trying to be- 
lieve the apostate, anti-Christ church word instead of 
the simple, the true, and the everywhere verifiable 
Christ word, everywhere on earth more and more ver- 
ifiable, as the successive years roll away, by all that is 
within us and all that is round about us. 

Our two only authorized gospels are based exclu- 
sively on reason, the reasons of Christ given us as the 
sole foundation of His Kingdom of the Heavens, and 
the reason of God in creation without which not a 
thing was made that has been made, the reason and 
truth of God as manifested in and through Christ, His 
own spirit. His law, His commandments. His word. 
His voice; all to be severely tested by the ever-present 
facts of being and of life. These are the sole grounds 
of appeal from first to last, in any of our com- 
manded Christ words, without the slightest appeal to 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 81 

church dogmas or superstitions of any sort; for at 
that time there were no churches nor church dogmas 
nor written gospels of any kind. How then does it 
happen that we are to throw all this overboard and 
settle everything by mere church dogmas, mere words 
and wind, is one of the unexplained mysteries, not of 
the gospel, but of the church. The church seems to 
have an awful and abiding fear that her church canon, 
as it is called, if but once touched off by a spark of 
reason will be blown into a thousand pieces on first 
trial, killing and wounding all the friends around it, 
as did our old "Peace-maker" cannon on shipboard 
some years ago; but our real Christ word has not the 
slioiitest fear of the sort. It has been loaded to the 
muzzle in thousands of battles and never harmed a 
finger of a friend of truth round about it; but it sweeps 
all lies out of being with a force that is terrific - to all 
who love plausible lies more than the simple truth. 
Mark and Luke are eye and ear witnesses (?) who never 
saw or heard Christ. They had merely heard of Him 
as millions of others have done. Right here then, our 
scripture canon, like our old ''Peace-maker," makes 
altogether too much peace, but without the slightest 
authority froni Christ. But Mark is decidedly our 
best gospel for all those who want no gospel at all. 
Apart from admitted interpolations he says nothing 
about the birth of Christ, nothing of what He said or 
did after His resurrection; and gives no coherent ac- 
count of anything that He ever said or taught that is 
of lasting importance to mankind. It would be im- 
possible to base a state or church or school on His gos- 
pel alone. Luke, on the other hand, flares abroad his 



82 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

account of His nativity, of His family and pedigree, 
and His various walks and talks after the resurrection, 
binding all back to the old prophesies of the Jews, some- 
what in Matthew's style, as though Christ came into the 
world and walked through it, as a mere autoinaton^ to 
illustrate old Jewish prophesies, which our only com- 
manded Christ word never condescends to notice; for 
He was not moving and acting, as the mere slave of 
the Old Testament or the New, though the whole 
world. Gentile as well as Jew, had for centuries been 
living, moving, acting and hoping for His appearance, 
as the final, great, ideal teacher of the race. But 
Luke so haggles, confuses and mixes up His personal 
^cachings that nothing conclusive can be derived from 
them. His putting into the mouth of Christ the old 
Jewish parable of Dives and Lazarus with the para- 
bles of the unjust steward and the importunate widow 
contradicts many of the most important things that 
Christ taught; while His wholly inimitable parables 
of the Prodigal Son and of the good Samaritan, which 
could have originated from nothing but the Christ 
spirit or personal words, contradicts nearly all that 
the church, as such, has ever taught. We make these 
suggestions in the full assurance that a far greater 
jjhilosopher than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, 
yea a greater than all the Jews and all the Grentiles 
have given as through all the ages, littered, jjroclavmed, 
defined, limited and hounded our real authorized Christ 
word as given us in the book of Matthew. I believe 
this, primarily, not because it fulfilled old prophesies 
or new, not because of any appropriate or inappro- 
priate so-called miraculous attestations or illustra- 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 83 

tions. For under His scheme of philosoph}^, anything 
any of lis either see or know is in its final aspect 
wholly inexplicable and miraculous; and, yet, in its 
current aspect as wholly in accord with law and order. 
But 1 believe this proclaimed Christ word because it 
alone has stood the test of all the ages past, and is 
likely to stand that of all the ages yet to come. But 
how it came and why it came is, in the last resort, as 
wholly inexplicable and miraculous as how the earth 
revolves and the sun shines, and the grass grows, un- 
less we admit that all alike are of the vnll of God^ as 
the Christ word teaches us; which is regular and uni- 
form wherever regularity and uniformity are needed, 
and just as easily irregular and varied wherever va- 
riety is needed, despite of all the dogmas of all the 
sciences, schools, and churches put together. It is 
self-evident from all our records that Christ both knew 
and foreknew, as we now do, the total incapacity of each 
and all of His disciples to clearly apprehend and truly 
report His teaching and His Kingdom. It was, there- 
fore, not only a proper thing to do, but it was an in- 
dispensable necessity that He should confine His entire 
authority to them to His own personal statements and 
words exactly as our record shows that He has done, 
if He ever meant to have any true report of His work 
and Kingdom recorded on earth; just as indispensable 
as it was for Washington and his compeers to write 
down and sign with their own hands what they in- 
tended to be Constitutional law and not leave it to 
posterity to fish it up out of the general debates of the 
convention which framed it. This beneficent and indis- 
pensable precaution, so characteristic everywhere and 



84 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

always of the real Christ and Christ word, not only 
enables the humblest reader to easily and readily find 
all the essential truths of His gospel and Kingdom, 
but it arms and equips each and every one of them 
with an impregnable armor of personal self-defense 
against all the possible assaults and hypocrisies of all 
the forms of king-craft and priest-craft, as no other 
religion ever did or could; hence this stupendous effort 
of the great church apostacy of the third and fourth 
centuries, and their succeeding heirs-at-law, to hide it 
wholly out of their way and oat of sight of living 
men. But it is reported that even the Pope, as well 
as our other sects, is now beo^innino' to slowlv crawl 
back ao'ain towards this ever-beino' truth of God and 
divine power of self rule on which alone Christ based 
His ever-being democracy of the skies, or proclaimed 
Kingdom of the Heavens. 

When Christ had with the most strict and philo- 
sophical accuracy defined God, "His God and our 
God, His Father and our Father," as the only inher- 
ent, invisible power of spirit in all that can exist, for- 
ever making it what it now is and must be; when He 
had, with a like scientific and philosophical accuracy, 
in His own words proclaimed the law and gospel of 
God's Kingdom of the Heavens, as the sole drift, aim, 
and end of all that can ever exist; He had practically 
completed all the true law and all the true gospel 
that is possible to this world or any other. Christ, 
alone of all teachers, based His entire religion exclu- 
sively on the simplest, ever-being and ever-present 
reason and trtct/i, alike common to all rational souls, 
learned or unlearned. He never saw or heard of, nor 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 85 



in any way authorized a written or printed Bible, book, 
gospel, or creed, or a church of any sort. He had not 
the slightest use or need of them. For He took good 
care to base His own proclaimed Kingdom of the 
Heavens exclusively on what He had said Himself, 
and not at all on what others might say or think about 
Him, whether called inspired apostles or antagonistic 
churchmen. For He well knew that not a man on earth 
clearly comprehended Him, especially that Peter, whom 
He was always rebuking and who preached His gospel 
some eight years without finding out that it belonged 
to Gentiles as well as Jews. Hence its entire reason 
and truth rests wholly upon Himself, while its motive 
power is evolved by its action and reaction upon others, 
as the power of gravity rests wholly in the eternal 
spheres, while its motive power is evolved only by 
reactions upon them. The old apostate church has, 
after all, never taught its ' 'very God of very God ' ' 
any new tricks of right reason, of right philosophy, or 
right government, or right religion. In spite of our 
futile attempts to read into the 25th of Matthew and 
a few other texts our heathen dogmas of probation, of 
hell, and of heaven, if we could but send these two 
simple gospels of the Christ word to all our brother 
men abroad, of whatever name or faith, freed from all 
other books and all known interpolations and mis- 
translations, to be proclaimed and taught to all na- 
tions and peoples exactly as Christ commanded his 
eleven disciples to do it; we should send to them the 
greatest boon that God, our heavenly Father, ever 
gave to His children on earth; we should allow and 
enable Christ Himself to have somewhat to say about 



86 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

His own gospel; we should enable every man on earth 
to test the promise of Christ for himself. "Come unto 
me all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and 1 will 
give you rest." /, I- — not the Pope and his Bibles, or 
the church and its creeds; but, simply, severely, and 
solely, I myself. We should enable all our preachers 
and teachers to act and appear solely as the teachers 
of the Christ word, instead of appearing as the hired, 
and oftentime, lying attorneys of rival sects. We 
should rid all our little children at home; all our Sun- 
day schools and free schools; all our poor people, both 
white and black; all our free states and institutions, 
from the continued agonisms, the immense costs and 
labors, and the appalling social dangers, that are every 
moment now threatening them. "JS/y words shall make 
you freey Nothing else ever did or ever can. But 
if we still insist upon keeping up all our heathen 
apostacies of sect and creed at home, instead of the 
simple Christ word; in heaven's name, let us cease 
sowing them abroad, thus giving an additional heath- 
enism to our already quite too heathen neighbors and 
brethren. For with all our inherited, sturdy strength 
and fibre, we can scarcely stand up and hold together 
under its strain at home; and, mixed with kindred and 
alien heathenisms abroad, it has, uniformly, either 
exterminated or enslaved all the weaker races to whom 
it has been sent, except where they have chosen it 
themselves and managed it wholly in their own way. 
No one could set this whole subject in a clearer light 
than that surprising man, Canon Farrar, has done in 
his eloqvient defense of General Booth and his Salva- 
tion Army. 



IN ALL THE WOELDS. 87 



CHAPTER V. 

CHRIST CREED AND CHURCH CREED. 

Any power od earth or in the heavens, whether 
human or divine, that attempts to set up a kingdom 
of any sort among men, without rigorously deigning 
for itself all its essential truths and principles, leav- 
ing any part of that work open to any and every hum- 
bug despot or church or state that may come after it, 
is simply a power of infinite idiocy, and no sort of a 
power of wisdom and of truth. Who can possibly be- 
lieve such a thing of Christ, "of His Father and our 
Father, His God and our God;" especially when we all 
know that throughout all the centuries Christ's pro- 
claimed creed, like the vanes we set aloft on all our 
highest towers, has pointed steadily and directly to- 
wards the invisible source of the power that moves it^ 
fore- warning all eyes of the storms and calms that are 
to come; and, like the statue of Memnon, awakening 
the same old tune of heavenly melody at each new sun- 
rise in every human soul that walks the globe. And, 
if there were a thousand or a million of them on the 
same tower, they would all work in harmony, and 
play only that same old tune. 

Whereas the creeds set up by the church, in place 
of this divine proclamation, are like the Flying Dutch- 
man, which boys whittle out and nail to the barn 
ridge, each Avith a sword in each hand, forever cutting 



88 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

and striking at the wind that blows it, and alone gives 
it its semblance of life, but never hitting it, while it 
hits everything else that chances to come in its way, 
and knocks it hither and thither. It never asjrees with 
itself or anything else; put up three or three hundred 
of them together, and you will only add to the conten- 
tion and fury of the discord. 

The old heathen political power of Rome gained 
nothing at all by crucifying Christ, the author of 
this proclaimed creed, and the apostles who succeeded 
Him, or by out-lawing, torturing, and murdering its 
professors and confessors, so long as the creed itself 
remains unchanged and unharmed; despite of all their 
king-craft and priest-craft, the human soul itself in- 
stinctively knew, as it now does, that that was the 
ever-living truth of God, whenever and wherever it 
chanced to come near them; by Christ made manifest 
in the flesh to and towards all living flesh, that was 
thereafter to walk the globe, to emperors, slaves, and 
priests alike; and to kill off its confessors was only to 
add fuel to the fire. They lost ground continually 
until some of their ambitious leaders got into and got 
hold of the church, so-called; and aspired to rule and 
reform it into a sovereign political power with them- 
selves as its head, in place of merely teaching to all 
alike Christ's only proclaimed Kingdom of the Heav- 
ens. As soon as they had got the several parts of their 
Flying Dutchman Bible creed whittled out and 
gathered together, and ready for use, they proclaimed 
it aloud through all the empire as the supreme law of 
God and man to all who live on earth, using the Christ 
proclamation as an old sermon, to be used only, if at 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 89 

all, as occasional tags for labeling and sanctifying 
their own apostate work. Thus they set up the second 
great golden image of the second Babylon, which ex- 
tinguished Christ's Kingdom of the Heavens, so far 
forth as the power of man could do it, from off the 
face of the earth, and set up their apostate church in 
its place, with themselves as its only inspired teachers; 
and all non- conforming men were declared totally de- 
praved, lost, damned forever, fit only to be burned by 
themselves in this world, and, by their new diabolical 
God, sure to be burned forever in all the worlds to 
come. What then happened ? 

Soon after this apostacy was completed, all the 
Eastern Provinces, where Christ and all the apostles 
were born, and lived and taught and died, were expelled 
from this apostate, tyrannical church for heresy; and 
one single saint of an old emperor, it is said, murdered 
a million of them in trying to reclaim them; and so it 
went on century after century, discord after discord, 
out-lawry after out-lawry, murder upon murder, and 
war upon war, till at last the Father of all raised up 
the Saracen, the better despot of the two, for the pro- 
tection of His people over all those lands, where 
Christianity was at first proclaimed, where the Christ 
word itself was born into the world. But all admit that 
the church is imperfect. Why not make a clean breast 
of it and confess the whole truth, that a despotic 
heathen church is no better than a despotic heathen 
mosque, and may be infinitely worse, as the darkness 
that conquers the midday is worse than that of the 
midnight. The only difference is that the church is 
obliged to carry the original Christ word along with 
7 



90 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

it in some shape, enslaved though it may be, while the 
mosque is not; and the ever-living, divine power of 
the Christ word, as of old, will still find access to mil- 
lions of human hearts, in spite of all dogmatisms of 
the church; and keep continually pushing all its des- 
potisms and humbugeries out of its way. Where the 
Christ word is strongest, they live and reign and exult 
and rejoice in the freedom of the Lord. Where the dead 
and despotic church word prevails, they hang their 
harps upon the willows and mourn, or learn to translate 
all its stupid and costly dress-parade of mummeries, 
and all its monotonous drawl of dogmas, into some 
sort of a confession of the Christ word till by habit 
this heathen service becomes a sort of second nature to 
them, like the habit of opium eating or tobacco chew- 
ing, and goes along down from them to their poster- 
ity; especially as great care is taken, and all parents 
are urged to begin to baptize and catechise all their 
children into this hereditary heathenism, as soon as they 
open their eyes upon this world, from the fear that the 
good Father of all may roast them forever in hell if 
they do not so drill and train them. If all this teach- 
ing and care were transferred to the simple Christ 
words, instead of the heathen church words, it would 
be exactly right and proper, and indispensable to the 
duties and privileges they owe to Him and His King- 
dom of the Hecmens^ here and noio^ on the earth. 

If you begin to-day at Eastern Siberia and travel 
westward around the globe, carefully noting all you 
see and hear, till you meet the Czar the great head of 
the Eastern church; if, when you have seen all that is 
in him and in his empire, you pass down to Constanti- 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 91 

nople, and meet the Patriarch, and note carefully him 
and his churches, you will have seen the heads of all 
the great Eastern churches. Passing up to Rome, 
you will meet the Pope, the pretended head and sov- 
ereign of all the others, of all Europe, and of all the 
world, the real vicar, as he is called, of God and of 
Christ, and of His religion on earth. Look at him 
well, and his whole retinue of kings, queens, and 
courts, priests, Jesuits, and monks, and the myriads 
of slaves that lie prostrate and wallowing in the dirt 
at their feet as well as at the feet of all the other heads 
of the church your eyes have seen. Pass on to Amer- 
ica, and you will find an infinite caterwaul of rival 
creeds and churches all crying, ''lo, here" and, "lo, 
there," with one church, bred and born on our own 
soil, Bible and all, ready to strike hands with the 
Pope in Mexico, or the Czar in Russia, or any other 
despotism that will give it foot-hold and shelter. You 
have now seen the organized church with its several 
heads, the declared and visible symbols of Christ and 
His Kino-dom of the Heavens, as it encircles the 
globe. Is it a striking resemblance to either ? Why 
should it be ? There is not a man, woman, or child in 
the whole of them that ever confessed or professed, or 
was baptized into any sort of allegiance to Christ's 
word, name, authority. Kingdom, or power, as clearly 
proclaimed, defined, and illustrated in these two books 
of Matthew and John; but they have all confessed, 
professed, and been baptized into allegiance to the 
apostate church, to the Bible of the Papacy, and to 
some sort of a creed, fished up out of its infamous 
depths, by their ruling priesthoods, perhaps, without 



92 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

a single real Christ word in them. This result cannot be 
ascribed to the inborn depravity of the people, who 
have had nothing to do with it, but to the apostate 
depravity of the papacies and priesthoods, who have 
compelled all Christians as well as all heathens to 
be baptized in this way or not at all, for the past fif- 
teen hundred years. If any man should propose to- 
day to be baptized, solely on the ground of that ''old 
sermon" of Christ, with only, here and there, an ex- 
ception, he would be scouted out of Christendom. He 
would be worse than was the man a few years ago 
who did not believe in the Bible doctrine of negro 
slavery. In all the despotic lands of the East where 
church and state are both united in some form of this 
apostacy from Christ and the Christ word, we see all 
these nations armed to the teeth against each other 
with iron-clads, rifle, cannon, bomb- shells, and sixteen- 
shooters, as no heathen people ever was or could be, 
and the only reason they are not engaged in a war of 
mutual extermination to-day is, that "the one is afraid 
and the other dares not." Is this your Kingdom of 
the Heavens on earth, your peace and good will to 
man, your liberty, equality, and fraternity for all that 
live and breathe? If so, the less we have of it, the 
better; and the millions of men truly inspired by 
God and the Christ word are striving to-day to get 
out from under it as never before. In our own 
country, while our church is the most hopeless chaos 
on earth, our state admits of, at least, a possibility 
of freedom, order, and peace, of the love of God and 
the brother-hood of man; if this devil-hood of papacy 
and sectarism does not, through its Jesuitic arts, un- 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 93 

dermine and overthrow it. All this is simply because 
oar patriot fathers, in founding our state, threw all 
mere church words into the sea, and based our Re- 
public solely on the Christ words, leaving all papa- 
cies and sects to take care of themselves, if they could. 
And all these millions of people have for ages 
been schooled and trained, catechized and drilled and 
preached to. They and all their fathers before them 
baptized and re-baptized, but always and only in some 
form into the Pope's Bible, church creed, and church 
word, but never a single one of them probably on earth 
to-day ever saw or heard of any man's being baptized 
into the simple, proclaimed, and commanded Christ 
words as all the apostles and the earlier Church mem- 
bers must, of necessity, have been. Is it any wonder 
then that they have come to consider some one of 
these various modes as a true baptism into Christ, 
especially that one which their fathers and friends 
have adopted, although we positively know that Christ 
never instituted any such thing, if there is any word 
of honest truth in our authorized records. All that 
these converts really mean to express is that they feel 
the love of God in their hearts and desire to confess 
it in some formal and appropriate way, and some form 
of consecration to the Bible and the church is the only 
mode known to them, and doubtless the good Father 
of all accepts the will for the deed. There is to-day 
such an anxious concern on this greatest of all topics 
among all thinking classes in America, teachers and 
scholars, preachers and hearers, as probably never ex- 
isted before on earth. It is said to be world-wide and 
to have startled even the Pope and his cardinals into 



94: THE ONLY GOOD THING 

considerations of a re-adjustment to the times. What 
are we Americans going to do about it? That is the 
question for us. A question I cannot pretend to 
answer; but, I suppose, if any one of the old apostles 
were here, he would say, ' ' Believe on the Lord Jesus 
Christ and stop believing on all other teachers, and 
thou wilt be safe" — saved from all needless harm; and 
if twenty centuries of direful human experience have 
taught the world anything, they have taught them 
exactly this, no more and no less; and, if a man be- 
lieves anything, why should he not confess and pro- 
fess exactly what he does believe, and no more 
and no less. Especially if that is the first word 
and the last word the Son of Man ever uttered on 
earth, and the only word He ever commanded any of 
His disciples to proclaim, preach and teach in His 
name, according to the only authorized record we 
have of Him. What claim of divine right, grace, or 
allegiance can any man or church have from Him who 
parts company with Him at this one and only vital 
point, and insists on a series of rival creeds and dog- 
mas in place of those so plainly commanded in His own 
words, especially when every man of them knows that 
his own pestilent creed can no more encircle the earth 
than can the belt with which he girdles his loins. But 
where on earth to-day is any true believer in Christ 
allowed to profess this creed ? What wonder if we 
baptize all men into the apostacy that the apostacy 
should at last secure them. 

If the reader will take these two authorized gospels 
and so interpolate the pronouns 1 and Me, wherever 
they refer to Christ, so as to make them honestly har- / 






IN ALL THE WORLDS. 95 

monious with our current church creeds, he will be 
made sensible of the appalling apostacy of these 
creeds, and the hideous amount of scholarly and 
learned sophistries and lies, indispensable to their 
birth and their continuance in the world. For ex- 
ample: "I (as your scape-goat, and the Pope's Bible, 
church, creed, and clergy as your teachers) am the 
way, the light, and the life of the world." "Whoso- 
ever believeth on, confesseth, hearkens to, and follows 
Me (as his scape-goat and the Pope's Bible, church, 
creed, and clergy, as his teachers) shall have (some- 
where, after death, and beyond the stars) eternal life:" 
and so on in all the texts, makins; each text tell the 
honest truth, according to the creed. 



96 THE ONLY GOOD THING 



CHAPTER VI. 
Christ's revelation of god. 

Philosoj)hy is always and everywhere humane and 
divine and verifiable by all that can exist, while The- 
ology is everywhere and always heathen, inhuman, in- 
solent, and dogmatic, and verifiable by nothing that 
ever can exist. The Christ is everywhere and always 
philosophical. He never uttered a theological idea, 
nor authorized any of his disciples to do so. 

Supernaturalism or God enthroned over all that can 
exist, idolize, baptize, and dogmatize over it as we 
may, whether with or without Bibles and books, will 
still remain nothing but a blank heathenism and des- 
potism; while ''Immanuel, God immanent, indwelling, 
and manifested in and through us and all that can 
exist, ' ' will still forever be the divine power of freedom 
and self-government and highest well-being in all the 
cosmos, according to the Christ word. 

According to Canon Farrar and other very able 
men, before proclaiming His law and gospel of the 
Kingdom, Christ had given out to those whom He 
met His only philosophical and scientific definition of 
God, or of the supreme power, presence, or omni- 
presence in being, call it by what name you will, and 
it has been called by thousands of names, all express- 
inof some of its real or fancied attributes. But Christ's 
apparently casual, concise, and simple definition or 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 97 

description of this confessedly indispensable presence 
in all things that exist, great or small, alive or dead, 
is the most perfect ever given to man in any language; 
and we fearlessly challenge all the languages and sci- 
ences of the world to-day, to produce its equal; here 
it is: "God is spirit^' — not a spirit nor the spirit, 
much less is He a person or any number of persons, 
whether one, two, or three, but universal^ invisihle^ 
ever-heing^ omnipresent spirit^ best symbolized by 
fatherhood; the only ^^logos^^ or reason, cause and 
ground of all possible manifested spirits, and, there- 
fore, to be worshiped by them only ' 'in spirit and in 
truth," and never in mere form, profession, or pre- 
tense. But spirit inevitably includes, within itself, 
life and force; for a spirit without life and force is not 
only non-existent but absolutely unthinkable. Spirit 
is the self-conscious, invisible, supreme attribute of 
man, determining and deciding all his qualities of 
life, and all his manifestations of force. This spirit in 
him alone of all beings on earth makes him capable of 
reason and of truth, and it is manifested only through 
acts of reason and of truth. In the Christ word, it is 
attributed to no animal, simply because it is in no 
animal, and never was and never can be; and when the 
spirit is gone from man, all life and all force and all 
worth is gone with it. By parity of reasoning, there- 
fore, this universal, ever-present spirit, forever, in, 
over, through, and throughout all that can exist, is 
perpetually manifesting itself to all individual, em- 
bodied spirits as the inspiring cause of all reason and 
truth; and through all living things, as the instinctive 
cause of all life and action: and throug^h all movins^ 



98 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

things, as the sole cause of all form and motion. 
And through all these together, co-operating con- 
jointly, is forever present, in, over, and through all, 
forever creatino- and re-creatino^ the heavens and the 
earth, and all that is in them, without beginning, 
without cessation, and without end. Such is Christ's 
strictly philosophical postulate of the eternal cause 
and ^^logos^^ or reason of all being, all comprised in 
one single word, embraced in a single power, that of 
spirit, as invisible, as inherent, as universal, as unin- 
termitting, persistent, omnipresent, and eternal as 
gravity itself; still as rapid, changeable, flexible, vari- 
able, as life and thought themselves are. Who on 
earth has ever suggested a better one ? What philos- 
opher or philosophy ? And what was his name and 
where did he live ? 

All sane men are conscious that there is one supreme 
power ever within them, w^hich inspires all their fac- 
ulties of thought and reason, supervises and directs 
their capacities of instinctive life and action, and de- 
termines their acts of mere physical force and motion. 
What they constantly feel in themselves to be true of 
themselves, they, as constantly, observe to be true in 
all the millions of their fellows around them. In all 
lower animals they observe no such capacities of 
thought and reason, but only instinctive capacities of 
individual life and action; while all inanimate things 
have no such inherent capacity of self-direction within 
themselves, but can be moved only as they are im- 
pelled by some force wholly outside of themselves. 
We are equally conscious that this supreme, directory, 
three-fold, invisible power of force, of life, and of 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 99 

spirit, is, practically, omnipresent in every part of 
our bodies; and that, when what we call the spirit has 
departed from the body, the body itself soon becomes 
a rotting, worthless heap of dirt. Hence all peoples, 
tribes, and languages under the heavens have, in one 
way or another, designated this supreme, invisible 
power of spirit, with its inherent capacities of life and 
force, as the supreme power in the cosmos, and also 
omnipresent in all that can exist; forever manifesting 
itself, either as a power of force, causing all form and 
motion; or as a power of life, causing all life and 
action; or as a power of spirit (as a whole) inspiring 
all thought and reason in beings capable of thought 
and reason. What can be more natural or more phil- 
osophical than this universal common-sense of the 
race, as here applied to the solution of the enigmas of 
being as a whole, by the only full-born Son of God — 
and all done by a single word, "God is spirit" — in- 
visible, universal, ever-present spirit, forever mani- 
festing itself in all that can exist, whether small or 
great, alive or dead, as giving form and motion, life 
and action, truth and reason, to each and every one of 
them and to each and all after their kind; substantially 
as is recognized in all languages and books under the 
heavens that are worth reading, as the supreme 
"logos," or power of reason and truth, that is for- 
ever creating and re-creating all things, small and 
great, and enlightening every man that cometh into 
the world, and each thino^ and beino' according^ to its 
uses and needs, without beginning and without end. 

By concession, therefore, of all philosophers and 
languages, and sane men that ever lived on earth, it 



100 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

takes, at least, two things wholly invisible and wholly 
unknowable, when apart and by themselves, to make 
any and every third visible and knowable thing, 
whether small or great, that is or can ever be known 
to us, or to any of our sciences and philosophies, viz: 
some ever-being, unknowable, passive substance^ capa- 
ble of being brought into visible form and motion; 
and some invisible, essential active power capable of 
actively bringing this substance into visible form and 
motion. The active and passive voice of all languages, 
and all tongues of all the ages, continually proclaims 
the inherent necessity of this two-fold, primal, co- 
operative condition of being, as pre-requisite to any 
known or knowable existence, or real or manifested 
being of any sort. When these two wholly unknowa- 
ble, active and passive causes of being, co-operating 
together, have made manifest some knowable thing, 
and have held it together long enough for our bung- 
ling senses and microscopes to fumble over it and find 
out what it is, all languages and peoples call the pas- 
sive substance, now made visible to the eye of sense 
MATTER of some sort, and the essential activity which 
made it visible, but is still itself invisible to all but 
the eye of reason^ it calls by some name signifying 
some invisible and ever-present spirit, power, cause, 
or ^^logosy And they distinguish and know and class- 
ify all matter by its ni^SSA^ forms ^ into solids, liquids, 
and gases. But, since the invisible power which 
brings matter into its present forms and holds it there, 
has itself no known form, they recognize and classify 
this only by its jjerceived methods or modes^ ' 'logos 
or laws of activity, such as the power of force, of life 



55 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 101 

of spirit. And to refuse to classify power according 
to its known methods and laws, and sophistically pre- 
tend that we know nothing about it, because it has no 
visible form, is as unphilosophical and stupid as it 
would be to refuse to classify matter, because it is 
throughout nothing but matter. Such a science and 
philosophy would be first rate for the ox or the ass 
which have no rational spirit within them or capacities 
of reason and thought. But it is plain to every rational 
creature, two-leofo^ed, or four-leo^o-ed, or with no leo:s at 
all, that we know exactly as much about ultimate forces 
or poicers as we do about ultimate matter. For we 
know nothing at all about either of them until by their 
co-operation they have brought some matter into visi- 
ble form; and then we know that the active power must 
have varied its methods or laws of creation, precisely 
as much, and at each precise point, wherever the vis- 
ible y6>>'??z produced, has been varied. What stupid 
assumptions of dogmatism, either in science or in 
faith, in Bibles or in books, have the ability to over- 
turn, or, in the least degree, to change this observed 
order of being known to all sane men on earth, 
and recoo^nized in all the lano^uao:es and all the arts of 
the globe, asserted and defined by Christ as the sole 
fundamental truth of His entire philosophy, in but two 
simple words — ^^ God is spiriV^ — invisible, inherent, 
ever-present spirit — with its inevitable adjuncts of life 
and force, forever manifesting itself in all that can ex- 
ist, without beginning and without end ? What phi- 
losopher has ever chosen a better word \ The scien- 
tific dogmatist who propounds any word signifying 
force alone leaves all of life and all of reason wholly 



102 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

unaccounted for; those who propose force and life sim- 
ply leave all thought and reason to their eternal or- 
phanage. Bat this word "5J?^V^Y"(made as He makes it 
at once the central power; and, consequently, the uni- 
versal environment of all that can ever exist, as really 
as we know the power of gravity to be) meets every 
possible emergency of knowledge and reason, of life 
and action, of form and motion. For all knowledge 
and reason is but the simple response of individual 
beings gifted with ' 'spirit ^^ to the universal ''spiriV 
manifested to them in everything round about them; 
all life and action is' the simple response of beings ca- 
pable of life and action; all form and motion is the 
response of things capable only of form and motion. 
Hence all spiritual beings, like man in the cosmos, are 
governed by the laws of free moral choice; all living 
beings by the laws of instinctive life; all lifeless 
things, whether in the shape of men, of animals, or of 
clods, are governed only by the inexorable laws of 
brute force which is the only response they can make 
to the all-environing, all-knowing, ever-living, and 
ever-present Spirit of God — or of all final goodness, 
forever in all, through all, and over all that can exist, 
small or great, dead or alive. 

Man is the only being known to us who has and 
manifests within himself all three forms of matter: 
solid, liquid and gaseous; all the three modes of force: 
concentric and cohesive, static or stationary, repellent 
and radiant; all the three modes of life: vegetable or 
functional, vital or animal, moral or rational and spir- 
itual. And he alone is capable of all the three known 
modes of spirit: human, angelic and divine. He 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 103 

alone, therefore, has Avithin himself powers that re- 
spond to whatever exists in the cosmos. And after 
all oar silly platitudes about anthropology, and our 
diabolical ones about total depravity, He is not only 
the sole beino^ on earth that is, in fact, made in the 
image of God, but the only one that is fit to represent 
Him, if God is anything like what our Christ word 
declares Him to be; and, if symbolized to sense at all, 
can be symbolized only by the best and purest man- 
hood and womanhood combined. Hence Christ says, 
''He that hath seen Me, hath seen the Father also," 
both one in spirit, or in harmonious co-operation like 
father and son. 

Modern science has abundantly demonstrated that 
all the ultimate passive forms of being which we call 
matter, and active powers of being, whether more or 
less, are persistent, ever-being, and eternal: and are 
only varied in their modes of manifestation. Hence 
passive matter, in its wholly invisible and unknowable 
forvis^ in all the chaotic heights of the infinite space 
that surrounds us, as well as in its manifested solid, 
liquid and gaseous forms so familiar to us, is forever 
right within us and in all the things round about us, 
changing in nothing but its infinite forms or modes of 
manifestation. It has also equally demonstrated, that 
all the attendant active jyoioers of being, whether more 
or less, are equally persistent, omnipresent, eternal, in 
all the invisible and unknowable infinite heis^hts above 
VIS, in all within us, and in all that is visible round 
about us, varying only their modes of activity, pre- 
cisely as the infinite variety of visible forms require. 
But here modern science shuts its eyes and refuses to 



104: THE ONLY GOOD THING 

discriminate and to classify: and rightly fearing to 
admit the heathen and ecclesiastical idea of either God 
or spirit, it stoutly assumes that a wholly unthinkable, 
unfeeling, and unknowable brute force called ' 'energy' ' 
is the only power manifested in being, while all the 
generations of sane men in all their languages have 
declared their consciousness of a threefold power of 
spirit, life and force, forever working within them and 
in all about them, as distinctly as they have declared 
their consciousness of the three-fold forms of matter, 
solids, liquids and gases. While our Christ word, 
forever agreeing with the common-sense of the peo- 
ple, and never with the scholastic assumptions of the 
teachers, distinctly declares spirit, with its inevitable 
attendants of life and force, to be the supreme cause 
of all things that can exist, making spirit, life and 
force eternally co-operative and persistent, and mat- 
ter the mere instrument of its ever-changing, ever- 
varying manifestations to the senses. And this spirit 
He symbolizes by a Fatherhood, in moral quality, in 
all its final ends and aims, just like Himself, the most 
motherly man that ever existed, and, therefore, the 
exact opposite to any idea of God ever proposed to 
the race, by any close corporation of priests or eccle- 
siastics that ever lived on the earth: simply because 
such* a divinity would not answer any of their private 
or corporate aims and ends. Hence, Christ, were He 
to come again in disguise, would be unable to get into 
any despotic or sectarian church on earth. But 
which of these assumptions are philosophically in ac- 
cord with our profoundest knowledge of ourselves, of 
all within us, and about us, or with the ever present 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 105 

and ever being best good of the race, putting wholly 
out of sight our ecclesiastical dress parade views of the 
heavens and the hells and its momentary probations, 
and its eternal judgments and damnations, derived 
solely from the church word, and confining our view 
simply to the proclamation and illustrations of the 
verifiable and commanded Christ word ? All our po- 
litical fore-fathers answered this question only in one 
way, by ruling the church and church words Avholly 
out of their system of government, and basing our 
government entirely on the Christ word and not at all 
on any church word. Are we, their sons, prepared 
to answer it in any other way? If so, why? Has 
their system proved either a dead failure, or a discord- 
ant chaos, or an unbearable despotism, like our sects 
and papacies ? 

The will of God '-'-houleemcC'^ is every where as in- 
exorably done in morals as it is in physics, though 
His benevolent desires ^Hheleema,^'' like those of all 
good parents, may be but seldom if ever fully realized. 
It is Q^o^'' s predetermined will that all created things 
and beings should serve Him; all physical things by 
super-imposed, inexorable, physical laws of necessity; 
all mere living beings by the laws of their necessitated 
life; all moral beings by the law of their free choice 
of evil or of good, forever in all times, places, and 
worlds reaping exactly as they have sown, good for 
good, and evil for evil; viz: good and an exalted 
power of the spirit for good to the spirit within, for 
all the good intended to be done, in despite of all the 
evils that may accumulate upon it from without; evil 
and a conscious degradation under evil for all the evil 



th 



106 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

intended to be done, despite of all the good that may 
seem to flow to it from without. Hence all moral be- 
ings must of necessity serve God, either as perpetual 
incitements or inspirations towards all that is good 
or as perpetual warnings against all that is evil, and 
they alone must forever take their choice between the 
two, till they find out for themselves that good is 
really better for all, than evil. A universe without 
both good and evil would not be fit for even a pig to 
live in. But, according to the Christ word, real good 
and possible evil forever lie open in all worlds alike 
to the free choice of all moral beings from God down- 
ward to the poorest beggar, despite of our dogmatism 
over the word '^prohation,''^ a word never in and never 
needed in any decent Bible. Everything is good 
when rightly used, and evil only when abused or mis- 
used. Paul more fully expresses this same idea by 
saying that "those who live after the flesh, shall of 
the flesh reap corruption, while those who live after 
the spirit, shall of the spirit reap life everlasting." 
That is, all undue pandering to the flesh alone, self- 
evidently, goes into the grave, and ends in corruption, 
while all true work done for the spirit, rises with the 
spirit into life ever-being. On the other hand, the 
everrbeing and ever-present law of spiritual retribu- 
tion, forever instantly executed over all worlds and 
all moral beings alike, is the only pain, penalty or 
punishment threatened against any moral being, in 
any world in the cosmos, by Christ or any of His 
Apostles, symbolized generally, as a cleansing by 
water or a purgation by fire. Christ never said a 
word about any future world, good, bad or indiffer- 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. lOT 

ent, nor authorized any other person to do so, except 
what he said to His own disciples in the fourteenth of 
John — ' 'In my Father's home are many resting places, 
if it were not so I would have told you. I go to pre- 
pare a place for you, that where I am, ye may be 
also." The home of the Father is the Cosmos, its 
resting places are wherever His presence is realized, 
whether on earth or in the Heavens; and the entire 
order of being is represented as being the same there 
as here, in strikino- contrast to the entire doo:matism 
and heathenism of the world. True, Christ touches 
upon physical and meta-physical laws only incidentally 
and casually. Hence all this is not placarded and 
flared abroad in ready-made dogmatic proof-texts, 
compelling the notice of every reader, but it is so inter- 
woven with the warp and woof of every thread of this 
discourse that one can hardly help seeing and feeling 
it who is not already predetermined to translate all His 
teachino^s backwards into the old heathen theologies and 
three world phantasies of the church and the church 
word. And, if ever our best teachers of modern sci- 
ence are allowed to fully complete their actual demon- 
strations, already so well begun, by exterminating all 
their present dogmatisms and bald and worthless theo- 
ries, and theorizings, our mutually demonstrated 
icorks of God and ivord of God, as given us by Christ, 
will begin to march around the globe in triumph, hand 
in hand, and arm in arm together. And the prophesy 
of "Peace on earth, good will to man, and glory to 
God in the highest," will at last be fully realized. 
Said Mr. Huxley in his last paper, ' 'Nothing great in 
science has ever been done by men, whatever their 



108 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

powers, in whom the divine afflatus of the truth-seek- 
er was wanting. ' ' But what shall we say of a truth 
seeker who bared and emptied Himself of everything 
in the past, as Paul says, to the extent of getting 
Himself baptized out of all His past heritages and 
prepossessions that He might lay His soul wholly 
open without possible let or hindrance to the teach- 
ings of the omnipresent spirit of all knowledge, all 
truth, and all righteousness, and continued steadfast- 
ly in that attitude until His most sad and touching 
death on the cross. Why should He not then by Mr. 
Huxley's rule have incidentally achieved the very 
highest pinnacle in the philosophy of physics as well 
as in that of faith and morals ? Whether we call this 
inspiring power "force" or "energy" or "life" 
or *" spirit" or "divine afflatus" can in no degree 
change either its nature or its results. Does not the 
prophetic thunder and voices of all the ages declare 
that we shall hear Him and Him alone? And what 
does all true science say to this ? We know what 
dogmatism and cant and sham and apostacy and hy- 
pocrisy have been saying, for, lo, this thousand and 
a half of years. Now let true science or the works of 
God, speak as directed by the omnipresent Spirit of 
God, and we shall all hear the true Christ word, as it 
was in the beginning, is now, and forever must be. 

Some wholly unknown old writer (no one knows 
who he was or where he lived, nor in what age he 
wrote, whether before Moses or after him, we only 
know he was neither a Jew nor a Christian, and made 
no pretensions of any unusual inspiration) this man 
wrote in the thirty-second chapter, eighth verse of the 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 109 

book of Job, which has come down to us, as follows: 
" There is a spirit in man (as a race), and the inspira- 
tion of the Almighty giveth to them understanding," 
(or rational knowledge of all sorts). (See also Job 4: 
15 and 33: 15.) Our entire Christ work attempts to 
expound to us in brief, axiomatic, self-evident truths 
and illustrations, our philosophical relations of ever- 
being duty and destiny towards this invisible, ever- 
present spirit, forever consciously working in all that 
is within us, and in all that we see around about us. 
He declares this one only supreme spirit to be the only 
perfectly good and wise one in the cosmos. Hence 
most Christian nations have given it the name of 
good contracted into God, instead of the more an- 
cient names of the '' Self -existent " — '' the Putter," 
"Placer," or "Creator " — or the "Giver of All," 
etc., etc., etc.; and He symbolized its moral qualities 
by a fatherhood like Himself, in eJffect a co-equal 
fatherhood and motherhood in the one only invisible 
fatherly being, whom He declared to the woman after 
the resurrection to be " my father and your father, 
my God and your God," whom to know aright is in 
itself ever-being life, as He had said, a little before, 
to " all liesh," to all who can ever live on the earth. 
Hence this all-moving, ever-living, awe-inspiring, and 
all- creating divine power of the Spirit of God, forever 
inherent and indwelling in all that can exist, whether 
small or great, alive or dead, as its sole-moving power, 
necessarily becomes also the sole- environing p>ower of 
all that can exist — as necessarily as what we call grav- 
ity is the sole-centralizing and the sole-all-environing 
force, in visible, physical matter. With such scien- 



110 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

tific accuracy of logic does Christ, by defining God as 
universal spirit, redeem the pledge of the old proph- 
esies, "Emmanual, God with us," to bring God and 
His Kingdom down from all the old heathen and He- 
brew dress-paradings of Him and it, away off up in the 
Heavens, on a great white throne where no one can see 
or feel or hear anything that belongs to Him, and put 
them both ' ^within us^ ' ' as He expresses it, or ' 'in our 
own heart and in our own mouth," as Paul expresses it. 
^' God in us and we in God that we might become one 
with the Father even as He and the Father are one." 
This is unquestionably His own ideal and definition of 
the divine power, forever indwelling in all that can 
exist, and thus forever creating and re-creating the 
Heavens and the earth and all that is in them.- But 
the old heathen Jews and Gentiles could not under- 
stand Him and so they crucified Him, as His last words 
on the cross, according to Luke, explicitly declare: 
'^ Father, forgive them, for they know not what they 
do." That is, they are too ignorant to comprehend 
me, therefore, enlighten them. And the same iden- 
tical spirit is manifested throughout the two author- 
ized Gospels, and that simple, natural, omnipresent 
spirit, so long as it was allowed to be truly proclaimed 
and taught, as He Himself directed, was rapidly con- 
quering the whole Roman Empire and the world, with 
all possible odds against it. And no power on earth 
could either stay or stop it, until, about the fourth 
century, the politicians of the old heathen Empire 
oegan to wholly set aside His oivn and only Proclama- 
tion of this ever-being Kingdom of the Heavens, as an 
old sermon, and His entire authorized word, by piling 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. Ill 

around it a great mass of books, which, in His act of 
baptism, He had rejected, and, by His last words on 
earth, had ruled out and discarded; and adding other 
books, which he never heard nor thought of, making 
all of them of equal authority with His own word, 
thus evolving a wholly new creed and proclamation of 
His Kingdom of the Heavens, and organizing and in- 
stitutmg the divisory dogmatism, and despotism of 
the devil-hood of the church, in place of the peaceful 
glory of His ever-Kingdom of the Heavens, with what 
results the entire history of the world plainly shows 
— more plainly to-day than ever before. For there is 
not to-day in any sect or denomination one single 
true disciple of Christ on earth that was not made 
'such by the simple teaching of the authorized Christ 
tcord and spirit as we now have it. Nor is there a 
single apostate, dogmatic, and domineering church 
or church-man that was not made such wholly by the 
super-added church words. Of course, all those grand 
and glorious truths of poetry and of eloquence, that 
self-evidently agree with the true philosophy of the 
Christ vjord and inspire the souls of all readers with 
the same spirit in all parts of the Bible and of all 
other books, are only so many beneficent illustrations 
of the omnipresent divine power of the great philo- 
sophic truths of the Christ word, either heralding 
their coming, or glorifying their advent. But whole 
books of that sort never existed and do not exist to- 
day, and a pretense that the creeds concocted from 
such books can be substituted for His own Proclama- 
tion of the Kingdom or any part of His authorized 
and commanded Christ word, or that any church 



112 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

can be substituted for this Kingdom of the Heavens, 
is as utterly heathen and absurd as it would be to try 
to substitute the notions of a town-meeting concern- 
ing universal history, for the Constitutional law of 
the United States, or try to dress -parade that town- 
ship as the entire Republic. Hence, whenever a man 
declares or professes to believe the Scriptures of the 
Old and Nesv Testaments to be the word of God, he, 
in fact, however ignorantly and unwittingly, for- 
swears his allegiance to the Father and the Son, and 
their proclaimed and clearly defined Kingdom of the 
Heavens, and professes his allegiance to the Pope and 
the priests and the church and its proclaimed heathen 
creed, as wholly unlike the Christ word as daylight is 
unlike darkness. 

We have often declared, and, we think, demon- 
strated that the only proclaimed law and gospel of the 
Kingdom of the Heavens contains, as He declares, all 
the essential axioms, all basal rocks truths of all pure 
and true morals, faith and religion, and of all just 
government possible to moral beings, whether in the 
Heavens or on earth, morally obligatory alike over all 
the highest functionaries and rulers, as well as over 
the weakest and most defenseless of subjects, whether 
in the Heavens or on the earth, and, if possible, still 
more obligatory on the highest than on the lowest. 
And if the Papal or the Bible God can dodge or skulk 
out of this moral responsibility under some pretext of 
necessity or expediency, whenever he chooses, surely 
the Christ and His clearly defined Father have never 
for once attempted it. We now proceed to declare 



IN ALL THE WOELDS. 113 

that this clearly defined Kingxlom and Father-hood 
over all that can exist, is not only strictly scientific 
and philosophical in itself, but that it is also itself the 
basis and the rock truth of all the true science and 
philosophy on earth to-day, or known to men in any 
age of the world, and that there is not a word in it 
that even looks towards any dress parade theory of 
any mere theology, ancient or modern. 

"And Jesus said unto him, thou shaltlove the Lord 
thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and 
with all thy mind. This is the first and great com- 
mandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou 
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. " " Seek ye first of 
all this kingdom of God, and its righteousness, and 
all these other things shall be added unto you." 
Which Lord God, which neighbor, and which King- 
dom of the Heavens? Shall we choose those presented 
and defined to us with such painstaking, philosophic 
care and accuracy in the verifiable and undoubted 
Christ words, for the magnificent defense of which the 
old church put Him to death on the cross, or shall we 
fall in with the blare of trumpets, the hoarse shouts, 
the tyrannies and murders, the dress parades and hy- 
pocrisies of the revived apostacy of the third century 
which Paul foreshadows as a doctrine of devils and of 
"old wives' fables?" What have we Americans, as 
such, to say about this as it affects our government, 
our free schools, and our free people; or have we no 
right to say a word about it, unless we are ordained 
churchmen; and, therefore, practically sworn and 
foresworn to some creed exactly opposite to every 



114 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

thing Christ ever taught upon earth ? If so, we would 
still do well to remember that no rational creature 
can seek, serve, and love these two wholly opposite 
Gods and kingdoms at one and the same time. 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 115 



CHAPTER YII. 

COSMOS OR WORLD, AND THE UNIVERSE. 

Christ used the word cosmos or world, just as we 
do, to signify the ever-present, physical world or the 
moral and social world of fashion and caprice, forever 
changing and passing away. The universe He every- 
where calls the Kino-dom of the Heavens. In conse- 
quence of His teaching we have come to understand 
the universe as an immense physical mechanism, 
harmonious in all its parts and processes, instinct as a 
whole and in all its minutest parts with a combined 
power of force, life and spirit, competent to run it 
forever without beginning and without end, and to 
repair it as it runs; instantly creating and re-creating, 
producing and re-producing, generating and re-gener- 
ating, supplying and re- supplying all its wants and 
needs for itself and all its parts and its entire infini- 
tude of processes, products, and appurtenances of all 
sorts. Every particle of matter in it is forever in mo- 
tion, no atom of it is ever still; but, for the most part, 
is forever in more rapid motion than is the swiftest 
cannon ball. Its entire moving power has its centre 
like that of gravity in all its minutest parts, but it 
has its circumference nowhere, so far as we know. 
All its motions of all its parts and powers are always 
in circles or circuits; never for a moment in any 
straight line, which must have a beginning and an end. 



116 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

Whoever, therefore, can find the beginning and end 
of a circle can find the beginning and end of 
this vast, inscrutable, incomprehensible mechanism 
or of some one of its important parts or processes. 
When, where, and how any part or appendage of this 
ever-present and ever-being, incomprehensible mechan- 
ism, with its inherent forces and powers, began to be 
or will cease to be, no one can tell us, or pretend to 
tell us, but the fellow who has squared the circle with 
Hebrew pot hooks in our grammar schools or with 
protoplasms or molecules in our more recent scientific 
schools. Our Great Teacher said no one but the 
Father knew anything about those theological things 
of the times and the seasons, the beo^inning^s and the 
endings. He did not, therefore, pretend to tell us 
anything of them whatever. Whoever can square the 
circle or explain to us a perpetual motion, so complex, 
so infinite and vast, forever running with such im- 
mense velocities in all its parts, without apparent wear 
and tear, and yet so nicely adjusted that every part 
gets to its place within a second of time, through 
thousands of years, and the whole thing or any of its 
chief parts, though standing only on air and ether, 
when at its equilibrium, does not weigh a single 
pound, he can tell us all about it. Whatever may be 
the shape of this inconceivable pile of visible mechan- 
ism, our own bodies with their capacities of self mo- 
tion, instinct with force, life and spirit, as a whole, 
and in all their minutest parts, are, unquestionably, 
the best symbols we have of it on the earth; and will 
be so regarded forever, despite of all our shallow out- 
cries about anthropomorphism. But, since the universe 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 117 

needs no legs to walk with, no hands and arms to 
work with, no ship-hold of a body to hold its appara- 
tus and supplies, some have supposed that the crown- 
ing part of every manhood, the enthroned central seat 
of all its faculties, the head by itself alone, at least so 
far as outline is concerned, best symbolizes to us the 
grand whole of being; and that the human brain is 
the key that unlocks all its enigmas. If that is so, 
the fellow that can explain to us how the first human 
brain was evolved out of dirt pile, according to He- 
brew, or out of protoplasm, through shellfish, snakes, 
and mud-turtles, according to science, this sort of fel- 
low can tell us exactly how God and being began in 
some far-off period by some lucky concurrence of atoms 
or molecules, and when all the world will peter out, 
and burn up and end. They need not fix the exact 
date. We do not care to go back or forward to verify 
their work. According to the simple Christ word, 
this universe is the house or home of our Heavenly 
Father in all its infinite heights and depths; and that 
heaven, the resting-place of weary souls, is in what- 
ever place or time the presence of the Father is real- 
ized in the soul itself, and "hell will be to pay," at 
least soon enough, in whatever place or world 
His presence is not recognized. According to 
this analogy, the whole visible universe is but a 
part of the body of God, as perfectly adapted 
to the uses and ends of His all-pervading spirit and 
power, as our own bodies are to our own ends and 
uses; and we ourselves, in our entire being, are but 
discrete, differentiated, individualized, microscopic 
parts of His own universal and infinite being; and, 



118 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

hence, one and all, sons of God and brothers to each 
other, and ought so to behave, as did our great leader 
and teacher; or, as the poet expresses it, 

"All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
Whose body nature is, and God the soul;" 

whose power and presence, 

"Lives through all life, extends through' all extent. 
Spreads undivided, and operates unspent." 

This ideal of the universe has no acceptance on 
earth to-day except where Christ's Proclamation of 
His Kino^dom of the Heavens has been allowed to stir 
the moral activities of the human soul, through all its 
possible heights and depths of thought and action. 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 119 



CHAPTER VIII. 

PERPETUAL RE-BIRTHS AND RE-INCARNATIONS. 

In this age of rapid progress, the scientist or the di- 
vine who does not rigorously adjust all his theories to 
this Christ word, and to all else that exists, is likely 
to find them all buried with himself in his own coffin. 
All the great teachers of the old Asiatic religions, the 
best of the Apostolic Fathers, and the most learned 
and scholarly of our recent divines, have all alike 
relied on some sort of re-birth or re-incarnation, as 
the method of divine resurrection and retribution, as 
may be seen from Walker's book on re-incarnation; 
and other books of the kind. 

We can have visions of a tub, full of water, in mid 
air without any bottom in it, or of spiritual worlds 
and beings dancing and prancing about in a vacuum; 
but no such thing ever did or could really exist. God 
without a physical universe, or God without body and 
parts, as our old heathenisms expressed it, would be 
a far stranger spectacle, if possible, than a universe 
without God, though we can in some sort think of the 
one without the other, as we can think of the matter 
in a stone apart from its cohesive force, and vice 
versa. Our Christ word everywhere alike ''bears 
witness to ever-being truths" and results, without 
ever stopping to discuss methods, while modern sci- 



120 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

ence points to the perpetual re-births and re-incarna- 
tions as the only possible continuance of being. 

Science has sufficiently demonstrated that all mat- 
ter is an eternal, unknowable unity, until some power 
or force, equally unknowable in itself, brings it before 
our senses; then conscious reason declares that force 
and life are but the mere attributes of spirit, and that 
where the one is there the other, potentially or ac- 
tively, must be, whether under the ice-bergs of the 
Polar Seas, or on the disc of the moon, or in the old- 
time fabled heat of the myriads of suns and stars, all 
of which our recent discoveries in electricity have cooled 
down to the level of our own constant heavenly spring 
and autumn temperatures. And, by parity of reason, 
all are swarmed and over-flowing with analogous, in- 
numerable forms of life. And, if the highest of these 
forms are at all like men or angels, their supreme 
well or ill-being forever depends upon that same 
supreme moral law of the universe which Christ 
brought down and declared to us; as necessarily as 
their physical well-being depends on the same laws of 
force and of gravitation. We know nothing whatever 
of the invisible powers of force, life, and spirit, but 
from their personally observed effects, as we feel them 
within ourselves, and observe them in things round 
about ourselves. And we know that in all highest 
beings, and highest ends of all being these three pow- 
ers must manifest themselves in a perpetual, co-oper- 
ative harmony in what are called moral or spiritual 
beings. Christ everywhere declares that He alone has 
truly revealed to us the sole law of their ever-being 
harmony which subordinates all force and all life to 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 121 

the spirit, the supreme law of right or righteousness 
in all worlds and beins^s alike. In the second classes 
of mere life and force, we observe force is consciously 
subordinated to life, while forms of mere force are 
governed by laws of a necessity existing wholly out- 
side of themselves. Whether our eyes can exactly 
mark out the hollows that lie between these hills in 
our science charts or not, we all know they exist. 
Modern science declares all forces persistent and im- 
perishable. If all forces of mere form and motion are 
perpetual to their eternal round, why not those of life 
and action, and more than all and above all those of 
thou£:ht and reason ? We have no reason to believe 
that an unchangeable, natural form, and much less an 
unchangeable, material life organism, is a possibility 
in nature, for we never saw or heard of one. Correl- 
ative growth and decay is the observed universal 
essential of their nature, and a necessity of their use. 
If the powers of force never cease from tearing down 
and building anew its structures of mere form and 
motion, why should the powers of life ever cease 
wearing out, tearing down, and building anew its 
needed organisms of life and action, or why should 
the spiritual powers of thought and reason ever cease 
wearing out, tearing down, and building anew its 
organisms of thought and reason ? We see the same 
sort of human, animal, and vegetable life power, each 
after its kind, passing out of one generation of living 
beings and into the next that succeeds it here on earth ; 
as plainly as we see that the cohesive force of the dif- 
ferent stones in one field is just like the cohesive force 
in the same sort of stones in an adjacent field. There 
9 



122 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

is no more mystery or reason of doubt in the one case 
than the other, though how any of these forces got 
inside of their manifesting forms no one can tell, any 
more than they can tell how a spirit is transferred 
into the body of a new born child. But, as Paul 
teaches, God giveth to each thing, creature, and being 
throughout the cosmos, a new body as it pleaseth 
Him, that death may be perpetually swallowed up in 
victory. But in the case of the human family, as a 
new birth and a new death occurs on earth in some- 
what less than every two seconds of time, the all-rul- 
ing, all beneficent, and ever-present Father of all 
human spirits, whether dead or alive, in the body or 
out of the body, would not have to wait very long be- 
fore He could assign an exactly suitable, new, clean, 
and pure infant body to each and every soul in need 
of one, for its next pilgrimage and career on the 
earth, or some other sphere; such as would be best 
fitted to its own needful discipline and development 
and for the highest good of all others around it. So 
continuing its re-birth and re-incarnation here on the 
earth, exactly according to the birth of the Son of 
Man, in every respect the great model teacher and 
leader of us all, till, at last, it comes to know ''its 
Father and our Father," whom to know is in itself 
ever-being life and to be prepared for an ever-being 
life on any planet in the whole cosmos. "I say 
unto you, this John is Elias, if ye can believe it." 
' ' 1 am (the true sample of) the resurrection and the 
life." " He that believeth on me, hath {Jiere and novj) 
an ever-heing life." "He that believeth on me, 
though he were dead, yet will he live again." ''Who- 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 123 

soever liveth and believeth in me, will never die." 
" Verily, verily, I say unto you, if a man hold fast to 
my reason, he will never see death." "Verily, ver- 
ily, I say unto you, except a man is re horn, he can 
not Idealize the Kingdom of God." If a man enter a 
second time into his mother's womb and be born, he 
is re-born of flesh. But if a spirit of a man, that has 
passed out of an outworn body, be assigned to a new, 
pure and clean infant body, for a new pilgrimage on 
earth, by the Father of all spirits, that man is re-born 
of the spirit from above, by the power of God. "Suf- 
fer little children, and forbid them not to come unto 
me; for of these same is the true King^dom of the 
Heavens." 

If the sun, as it is now shown to be by our most re- 
cent steps in science, is the material heavenly globe of 
our solar system, around which all its forces are play- 
ing, and towards which all life forces with their un- 
ceasino^ ofenerations of births and re-birthson the earth 
are perpetually tending, and to which they will be re- 
moved as fast as fully prepared; then, indeed, our 
Father's house or home in the skies must in fact sur- 
pass all that the apocalyptic dreamers of earth and 
time have ever dreamed of. For, by the conditions 
of the proof, its own life and light is excited into 
radiant activity on all sides at once, not only by the 
surrounding planets, but from all the thousands of sis- 
ter suns and stars of the cosmos that are forever pour- 
ing their power of light upon its surface and receiving 
theirs from it in return; and so they need not the 
light of the sun or the moon by day, and there can be 
no night there. For the glory of God, pouring in 



124 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

from ten thousand suns, will lighten it; and the Christ 
word, there as here, will be the only moral light there- 
of. Its gates will never be shut, "and the kings of 
the earth will bring their glory and honor into it, and 
they shall bring the glory and honor of the nations 
into it." No temple will be seen in it, for all will 
there have outgrown their need of any sort of heathen 
paraphernalia of sacred temples, altars, sacrifices, 
persons, priesthoods, places, times and things. For 
all things round about them will be seen to be holy 
and sacred by the realized and manifested presence of 
the Father of all, in all, through all, and over all that 
exists. If the artificial items in this description of 
the heavenly city are fantastic and incredible, all its 
natural elements are purely and thoroughly scientific 
and consistent, so far as we can now know or see. 
Surely, here is regeneration, re-birfch, re -incarnation, 
eternal sanctification, and salvation all in one, and all 
forever going on together as quietly and silently as is 
the harmony of the eternal spheres. We need not go 
outside of the Christ word for a single line of it to old 
theosophists or young agnostics. And, if the time 
shall ever come, when men shall be allowed to read 
the simple Christ word, as it was continually pro- 
claimed, and commanded to be given to the world, 
without being first translated, and bedeviled by the 
apostacies of the church word; something like this 
must be the inevitable outcome of it, both for us and 
for all who live upon the earth. Oh ! yes, but our 
great doctrines of trinity^ penalty of law^ j^artZf??^ of 
sin^ probation^ eternal deaths reprobation^ hell-fire^ etc. , 
etc., what is to become of them? Well, since no 



IN ALL THE WORLLS. 125 

shadow of them was ever in any Christ word, nor in 
any decent Bible on earth, we do not care what is to 
become of them; no more than we care what is to be- 
come of the darkness when the light is let into the 
room. We have not the slightest use for them. If 
you like them, you may pack them all up in one ban- 
dle and go off in search of your own everlasting hell; 
and, if you find it, I would advise you to throw them 
all in a heap into it, and come back, and go with us; 
believing in the real Christ word, in "His Father and 
our Father, His God and our God," all His heavenly 
resting-places, here and now, as well as in His higher 
heavenly home in the skies above, for all that live. 
If we give the least heed to the Christ word, and sci- 
entifically teach the nations only along the lines of 
natural reason and truth as He commanded us; some- 
thing like this will be the inevitable outcome for all 
who dwell on the earth. Each soul will receive ex- 
actly, through the body, according to what they have 
done, whether it be good or whether it be evil; reap- 
ing good for all' the good sown, and evil for all the 
evil; never escaping it, by any heathen theologica 
trick of substitution or atonement, "till they have 
paid the uttermost farthing." In successive pilgrim- 
ages, all tyrants, knaves, and villains, the proud, the 
scornful, and the cruel may exchange places with 
their victims; and thus they will learn for themselves 
what the real truth of the matter is. All souls will 
have full opportunity to learn for themselves, the 
good or the evil of all conditions of life on the earth, 
as a necessary pre-requisite to their passing to other 
and higher spheres of bsing, where their bodily facul- 



126 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

ties may become so developed as to be able to gather 
up into themselves the substantials of all the good 
they have received; while, at each successive step in 
life, they have dropped the evils with their outworn 
bodies in their graves behind them. Is not this as 
well and as Christian as it would be to forever torture 
them with hell-fire; and finally, at some great judg- 
ment day, at the sound of the trumpet, thousands of 
years hence simultaneously startup out of their graves 
all the dry bones of earth and time, so multitudinous 
as to cover over the whole earth, many tiers deep, tier 
upon tier, all to be reclothed with flesh. Is not this 
sort of resurrection, after smouldering in the uncon- 
scioQS grave, or struggling against the fires of parga- 
tory for thousands of years, a somewhat queer way of 
giving people an ever-being life which can never die 
and never see death? The heredity of physical and 
animal life in man and all other beings is always from 
their parentage, of the earth, earthly, and, in man, 
after the flesh. But the heritage of the zoic or spirit- 
ual life in man is always from above and after the 
spirit, from the Father of all spirits. Apart from the 
interplay of this two-fold heredity in man, the one 
from the earthly parent, the other from the divine, 
the facts of human nature are inexplicable. Child- 
hood is generally the most innocent and the happiest 
period of life; but more than half the human race die, 
as we say, or leave the body to enter upon some new 
career before they are ten years of age. These infant 
souls are perpetually, and in all lands, the most in- 
centive and effective missionaries of the love of God 
to the hearts of the race that ever come upon the earth. 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 127 

Any one of them is worth a score of our full-armed 
apostate dogmatists, so far as human hearts and souls 
are concerned. Why, then, should they not be kept 
in action and re -action upon the sympathies of the 
race as they always have been ? And how emphatic- 
all}^ true it is that of such as these is the Kingdom of 
the Heavens, here on the earth, and, perhaps, in all 
other worlds and spheres, these newcomers fresh from 
the hand of God Himself are, by no means, useless. 
But, in the apostate scheme, the few who had received 
the right dogma and the exact kink of the dogma are 
gathered into a world of wholly useless unending 
bliss, while the innumerable multitude are cast into 
their pre-destined eternal fire. Which of these schemes 
is of God or of Christ, and which is born only out of 
the devil-hood of the apostacy ? 

None of the authorized apostles say a word to us 
about Christ's ascending into heaven or descending 
into hell, or about His ever saying or doing anything 
to them except through His own personal, living body. 
By concession of modern science, death, or the final 
separation of the soul from the body, is entirely pain- 
less, and the convulsions that frequently attend it are 
simply spasmodic and unconscious. The anatomy of 
the brain and other facts demonstrate that mere mem- 
ory is wholly of the body and perishes with the body, 
while conscious identity and power are wholly of the 
spirit. 

"Hulee" is the invisible, omnipresent, jpassive sub- 
stance^ by means of which all things are perpetually 
individualized and made manifest. Spirit is the in- 
visible, omnipresent, active power of life and force, by 



128 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

reason of which all things are perpetually individual- 
ized and made manifest. How, when, and where, 
these two essential elements of all manifested being 
began to co-operate, or will cease their co-operation, 
or when or where there was less or more of either of 
them in the world than forever has been and will be, 
are great perpetual mysteries of godliness which 
neither Christ nor any of His apostles pretend to ex- 
plain to us. Our wholly heathen theologies are alone 
competent to the task. 

CONCLUSION. 

So we come at last, whether by the route of the 
Christ word, or by the route of science, to the full 
assurance of faith that the omnipresent Spirit of Grod, 
as manifested to us in all form and motion, in all life 
and action, in all thought and reason, and in all death 
and resurrection, is '-Hhe only good thing or heing^^ in 
all the worlds, as Christ Himself has taught us. ''And 
Jesus said unto him, why callest thou me good ?" 

"There is none good but one, that is God." 

Our law and gospel of the Christ word applies to 
all possible worlds and beings alike. But it gives us 
no theory or theology of our future states or condi- 
tions in this world or any other, whether good or evil, 
outside of its universal proclaimed law. No sane man 
can feel sound health in his body and sound health in 
his soul of the true love of the Father and of the Son 
without instinctively hoping and trusting that they 
will some how be perpetual, though he never can 
demonstrate that they will, in fact, continue over 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 129 

niojht. If these susf^'ested theories of the re-incarna- 
tionists are not the true theories of the ever-being fu- 
ture life of the spirit, they are, at least, better and 
more in accord with the true Christ word than the 
utterly heathen and diabolical theories enforced upon 
the world by the fire and sword, the tortures and tor- 
ments of the old apostate church and creeds. And, 
if our Heavenly Father cannot do this for us. He will, 
at least, do something better and not infinitely worse 
before He s^ets throus^h with us. 



130 THE ONLY GOOD THING 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE PROCLAMATION OF THE KINGDOM. 

JN2R0DUCTI0N. 

This ever-being proclamation of the law and gospel 
of Christ's true Kingdom of the Heavens over all 
worlds and beings, as here reported to us by Matthew, 
is the only utterance that ever existed on earth, that 
now has or ever had the slightest pretext to that 
place of high authority and supreme rule. It is the 
only true and complete philosophical discussion and 
illustration of the law of love to God and love to man, 
of all highest human daty and human destiny, and the 
sole basis of all just law, either in heaven or on earth, 
extant to-day. It is the only extant explanation of 
the true way to be born of God. Its entire whole is 
verifiable by everything that exists in us and around 
about us. The writings in Old Testaments or New, 
the unanimous vote of churches or sects, have no 
more power to change a word ' or letter in this pro- 
claimed and verifiable Christ word, than old docu- 
ments and charters, or the votes of our school teach- 
ers and children, have to change the constitution and 
laws of the United States, or the laws of our solar 
system. ''Behold, I make all things new." This 
proclamation is not properly a growth or evolution 
from anything that preceded it, any more than the 
philosophy of Copernicus or Bacon was a growth out of 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 161 

the flat world system, or American freedom a growth 
out of Negro slavery or other forms of despotisms, or 
sunrise a ijrowth out of midnio-ht. It was a divine 
inspiration, a revolution that 7iecessltated the total 
destruction of the past; and a wholly new illuminatian 
for the future; a new sunrise, not a new lamp trim- 
ming. And this proclamation is the only document 
ever on earth, which clearly comprised and defined it, 
whoever may have been its author. Proclaim the 
essentials of this kingdom, in any form of words, in 
any language or place on earth, and in so far as 
heeded, it will at once begin to produce "Peace on 
earth, good-will to men, and glory to God in the 
highest," while no other Bible, book, or creed de- 
vised by the wit of man, or by the church will ever 
begin to produce that effect. A few centuries ago, 
the whole clergy and the church were as heathen, 
irrational, despotic, and devilish, as are their creeds, 
and in the pretended name of Christ they extinguished 
all freedom and humanity, and well nigh extinguished 
human nature itself; but the ever-living spirit of God 
and of the true Christ word has made them far better 
than their creeds, at least in our own country, and 
they are now everywhere rapidly restoring the true 
philosophy, life, and power of the Christ word in 
place of the dead theologies and dogmas of the past. 
If anyone will compare, topic by topic, this procla- 
mation with any extant church creed, he will instinc- 
tively perceive, that the one wholly antagonizes the 
other. Why the devotees of such antagonistic creeds 
should be called Christians, or why their churches 
should be called churches of Christ, no man can ex- 



132 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

plain, unless they are at heart vastly better than their 
proclaimed professions. 

If oar simple, verifiable, and commanded personal 
Christ words are not our only test and measure of all 
truth, duty and destiny, we have none now and never 
had any. All our other pretended scripture canons 
and creeds are therefore both a forgery and a fraud. 
All the facts of history for three thousand years past, 
confirm this view. (See Gerhard's "Coming Creed of 
the World," or any similar compilation of facts.) 
This simple but most profound philosophy of love to 
God and love to man, that wholly unlearned multi- 
tude of hearers, who first heard it, seems to have com- 
prehended more completely than any conclave of 
learned divines has ever done since. There is not a 
word or thought in it that even looks toward any He- 
brew, or heathen, or papal, or sectarian scheme of 
theology, or attempted theory of the infinite as a 
whole — no absurd attempt to define or limit the 
power, or ways and means of God; His place of resi- 
dence, or means of reward or of torture in heathen 
heavens or hells — or the beginnings or endings of 
things or beings which run in everlasting circuits 
without beginning and without end, which Paul de- 
nounced to the Athenian philosophers as superstition, 
and in his letters called a false philosophy of vain de- 
ceits and old wives' fables, and constantly urges upon 
them only those few things known of God among all 
peoples, not after the method of these theologisings, 
but strictly and severely after Christ. (See Col. II, 
8; I Tim, VI, W.) Theology is a wholly heathen 
method of reasoning about the absolute, the infinite, 



[N ALL THE AVORLLS. 133 

the abstract, the unknowable, a word, like most other 
creed words, not found in any Bible: of wholly 
heathen origin and use; while our whole Christ word 
and philosophy talks only of things best known and 
most easily verifiable to the common sense of all sane 
men. His simple thought everywhere is that the 
Father of all will forever take care of the best inter- 
ests of all His children, who in any degree desire to 
learn and do their duty to each other here and now, 
whether they understand much or little about His in- 
finite ways and means of accomplishing His purposes. 
His words are directed exclusively toward the philos- 
ophy of personal self-government, the indispensable 
foundations of all other government. He never uttered 
a word that even looked toward giving any man or set 
of men any sort of official control or precedence over 
their fellows, much less a right to domineer over their 
beliefs and convictions. 

RULES OF TRAXSLATIOX. 

The Hebrew lano-uao-e consisted orio^inallv of a pile 
of consonants, without vowels, stops, or pauses, or 
complete moods or tenses, having no present tense at 
all, expressing everything as either past 0Tfictii7'e, and 
nothing as present. It was therefore admirably 
adapted to all the needs of an expert translator, as he 
could readily doctor it into anything of history or 
prophecy as his needs required. No competent man 
on earth to-day even pretends to know what that name 
was, given to Moses out of the bush, to be the exclu- 
sive name of God forever, unto all generations, 
whether Javah, Jehovah, Jove or Jupiter, or some- 



134: THE ONLY GOOD THING 

thing else, and no Christ word even remotely alludes 
to it, but gives us an entirely other name as the only 
hallowed name of God. How much of the first of 
Genesis and other passages is intended for history and 
how much for prophesy, can be decided only by guess 
work or inherited church dogmatism. 

The Greek language, on the other hand, is one of 
the most thoroughly accurate, copious and complete 
that the wit of man has ever devised. The demonstra- 
tive and emphatic significance of the presence or ab- 
sence of its one article; its three forms of negatives; 
its three distinct words for the various forms of life; 
its three equally distinct words for the various modes 
of love; its full supply of all possible numbers, cases, 
moods, and tenses; of all needed articles, particles, 
and possible qualifying words, render it almost impos- 
sible to essentially mistranslate it, wherever it ex- 
presses any sort of a true thought, if the translator 
heeds the text before him and gives it an exactly lit- 
eral or equivalent translation. 

Their demonstrative article when present was al- 
ways emphatic, and meant the one true and real per- 
son, place, or thing of the kind: or the one before 
mentioned, or alluded to, or implied in the utterance: 
or the one best known to all hearers or readers, in con- 
tradistinction to all other thino-s of the same name. 
"The God," ''the law," "the virtue," etc., meant 
"the true and real God, law, etc.," as opposed to all 
shams and falsehoods of the same sort: or that one al- 
ready alluded to and defined, or necessarily implied by 
the speaker: or that one best known and admitted by 
all the hearers. In this case the article would often 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 135 

go into English by the word ''our" or "its." Thus, 
instead of saying, "The Abraham," "The Moses," 
"the Jerusalem," "the God," "the virtue," "the 
court," "the Sanhedrim," "theGehenna," "the evil," 
we should say "our, or best known, Abraham," etc. 
"Deliver us from the evil" in the Lord's prayer means 
its evil, or the evil necessarily implied in the trial. 
The entire omission of their article should be supplied 
not by our definite article, but by some one of our in- 
definites, according to the context, «, one^ some^ any^ 
every ^'''^ etc., but never by a definite word. 

Their two negatives, wholly distinct and totally un- 
like in sound and meaning, when combined forming a 
third form of negative, need everywhere most careful 
heeding in all New Testament Greek, especially as 
nearly, if not quite, all modern languages use but one 
negative. The broad Greek "m^" means "never," 
as, never lie, steal, murder, etc. While in all adver- 
sative sentences their utterly different soft "mee" 
meant "not merely^" "not alone" do this, that, or the 
other, but also do something higher or better. Al- 
though in entirely simple sentences these negatives 
may be changed for simple euphony, "mee" still retains 
our softer meaning "do not" rather than our harder 
meaning of "never." One may, be used as a simple 
sign or question only; and by reduplication the one 
intensifies the other. Not to notice the difference be- 
tween these two negatives everywhere apparent is 
simply neither to read the Greek nor translate it at 
all, and has been the fruitful source of all our bald de- 
nials of the Christ word on the one hand, and of our 



136 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

absurd non-resistant theories of Quakerism, Toi- 
stoiism, etc., on the other hand. 

The translation of their past subjunctive, which is 
really a perpetual or eternal tense, so far as time is con- 
cerned, into a mere future, often strips it of half its 
real force. They had a future tense as well as we, 
and when they wanted it they used it as we do. Al- 
ways imposing our authoritative shall instead of our 
mere scientific will upon all their future tenses is an 
assumption of mere dogmatism, and reminds one of 
the bad English of the Frenchman who, on falling 
overboard, exclaimed, "I will be drowned, nobody 
shall help me. " 

The above remarks have very much to do in the 
translation of what is reported to us as Christ's pro- 
clamation of his kingdom of the heavens, the only 
public speech He ever made in His life, on the basis 
of which He distinctly declares His kingdom of the 
heavens, and all our true ideas of God, duty and 
destiny, must forever rest. Whether it is true or not, 
and worthy to be admitted to the place He assigned 
it; or in whole or in part untrue, and therefore so far 
forth to be rejected by all sane men, depends wholly 
upon how it is translated and understood. As the 
translation now stands, and has stood for three hun- 
dred years, under mere church authority, no sane man 
can either accept it or believe it. For no man can 
live a single year in this world or any other that we 
know anything about, accepting every iota of the old 
laws of the Jews, as firmly based and as enduring as 
are the heavens and the earth; taking no thought for 
the morrow, resisting no evil, judging of nobody, and 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 137 

laying up nothing for the future; except it be, per- 
haps, in an insane asylum, where other people make 
laws, and take thought, and resist evil, and judge, 
and lay up, and provide for him. 

The Greek word ' '■oun'' ' means ' 'for all these rea- 
sons or causes presented before," whether more or 
less, and is only half translated by our English 
''wherefore" or "therefore," while our meaningless 
"for^" as a preposition, is made to do duty for some 
fifteen or twenty Greek works, whether it translates 
them or not. For example: Christ died '•'huper 
humon,^^ "in our behalf," or "for our good." Our 
English word "for" jumbles into it the absurd and 
outrageous idea that He was in fact forced to die in 
our stead. 

The preposition ^/<? mean's "toward" some end or 
aim, whether it reaches unto or into it or not. It 
is often mistranslated, and in Matthew FJ ^^, is very 
conveniently wholly unnoticed. 

The Greeks also had and used three distinct words 
for the three well-known forms of visible life. First, 
jyhus for mere vegetable or functional life; second, 
psychic^ or animal life; third, zoic^ or the primal, 
human, rational or, as Christ terms it when perfected, 
ever-being or eternal life. All these three forms of 
life are found in man alone, and their distinctive 
organisms can now be demonstrated by the knife of 
the surgeon. Most modern languages have but a 
single word for life, whether in the vegetable, 
animal, or in man, and with this meagre equipment 
often run wholly amuck of Christ's real meaning. 
Neither Christ nor man could afford to plight or 

lO 



138 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

subordinate his higher, zoic life to any use for a 
thousand worlds like this, while he and we and all 
others should subordinate as he did his lower life to 
the ever-being demands of the higher. 

But the Greeks also had three equally distinct 
terms for love, while we Latinized moderns have but 
one. We love "Brandy, wine, and women," friends, 
countrymen, lovers and enemies, sin and holiness, 
God, man, and the devil, all with one and the same 
unmeaning word, defined only by its object, itself sug- 
gesting no classification of thoughts or of things. The 
more analytical and philosophical Greeks used three 
distinctly classified words which they seldom or never 
confounded. One from errao^ from which comes our 
word error ^ significant of all modes of mere functional 
or sexual love; the second from phileo^ from which 
we derive our w^ord filial, implying the reciprocal love 
of family, kindred, friends and countrymen; the third 
and highest mode of love, the universal divine love, or 
love of pure benevolence, they derived from agapeo^ 
made up of agad^nd. j>oiso^ which means pure goodness 
in action, as aga-thos means goodness in repose. This 
sort of love is everywhere and always controlled by 
the highest reason and never separated from it. It 
has nothing whatever to do with mere feeling or de- 
light in visible things, or mere personal aims or ends. 
It may be manifested on the cross as well as on the 
throne, on a bed of thorns as well as one of roses, 
perhaps even better. But our single English word 
love leads us primarily to think of mere modes of 
feeling or personal delight, but to tell us to love our 
enemies, or that God is primarily love in this purely 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 139 

emotive and natural sense is in the first instance im- 
possible, and in the second misleading and a depart- 
ure from the word used in the Greek text; but we can 
and should actively do good, not evil, agapeo^ to our 
enemies as well as to our friends; for God is in his 
essential nature agapee, essential active goodness to- 
ward all persons and beings throughout the cosmos, 
and as John truly tells us, as well as does Christ 
everywhere, that we can manifest this sort of love 
back toward Him only by keeping His command- 
ments, whether in any lower sense we love to do so or 
not. Hence much of the strain and stress of our revi- 
valism, to work up some irrational mode of mere feel- 
ing toward either God or man, falls far below this 
universal divine love, so clearly defined in the Greek 
text. Hence we should read in this discourse, "Do 
good unto your enemies " instead of " Love your ene- 
mies," and "Do well to those that hate you." 

The translation in the 13th of I Corinthians of aga- 
pee in the old version is "charity," implying one 
mode of doing good and of kindly feeling. The 
revisors have translated it ' ' love, ' ' implying in itself 
mere feeling. Probably neither carries the full idea 
of the combined feeling and action implied in all high- 
est well-doino^ or doins^ o^ood; our word benevolence 
seems more truly to imply the full idea, which is not 
a matter of mere reason, or mere feeling, or mere will, 
but of all three combined. 

All matino- and herding animals have the organ- 
isms and capacities of the two lowest forms of life and 
of love, especially toward their young and their kind, 
but no one of them was ever capable of the highest 



140 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

kind of life and of love: Man alone has within himself 
the spirit, the organisms, and the capacities for all 
three of these kinds of life and of love combined in 
one being, and when normally developed they im- 
mensely sustain, and illustrate, and complete each 
other and the entire manhood. 

Christ before Pilate declared that he was born and 
came into the world to bear witness to the truth, and 
his entire manner of teaching, living, and acting, as 
given us in his only authorized gospels, of Matthew 
and John, is that of the exact teacher and philosopher, 
never that of the assumed dictator and law giver. He 
everywhere insists that all feeling and conduct should 
be based on pure reason, the reason of God, mani- 
fested in everything that can exist, and never that 
reason is to be based on feeling and conduct. He is 
always the most persistent reasoner that ever spoke. 
No teacher ever gave so many reasons in so short a 
space. .In all our translations and interpretations it 
is our business to preserve this philosophic subjection 
of everything to pure truth and reason, without the 
slightest regard to inherited prejudices and supersti- 
tions, or prevailing fashions and sentiments. The 
truth of God and the reason of God lie forever wholly 
above such low and perverting ends and aims. 

Modern science has wholly demonstrated .that each 
and every planet in the cosmos must have its own 
peculiar visible height or heaven, showing to the eye 
of sense various indefinite visible heights, while all 
these heights and appearances together are called "the 
heavens," and their true philosophy, the philosophy 
of the heavens, or of the entire cosmos of being. All 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 141 

religions use these visible heights in space as symbol- 
isms of various spiritual attainments in life and des- 
tiny. It may be said that this distinctive scientific use 
of the terms "heaven" and "the heavens" was 
wholly unknown to all old Jewish and church writers 
who made up their cosmos of only three flat worlds, 
heaven, earth, and hell. But is it not possible, to say 
the least, that a being sent into the world to truly 
reveal God the creator of the cosmos, to be Himself 
the light and life of the world through all coming 
ages, might be inspired to know more about the cos- 
mos than did the old monks of the barbarian ages, and 
might show that higher knowledge simply by His more 
truthful and scientific use of terms, without any 
affected dress parade of science ? If so, shall we trans- 
late exactly as we read, or reduce His whole utterance 
to the dead level of the ignorance and barbarism of the 
old monks of the dark ages, who undertook to revise His 
whole gospel to subserve the ends of their despotisms 
and dogmatisms ? While Christ prescribed no other 
terms of discipleship to any man, good or bad, either as 
profession or confession, but a simple desire to learn 
of Him, He enjoined upon all alike that they should 
^ ' homologise ' ' or harmonize with Him in all they said 
or did before men. All this the church speedily trans- 
lated into a mean and pitiful confession of sins in 
some private priest's ear, or flared it abroad into a 
sort of dress parade confession and profession of 
church dogmas, which Christ never heard of or thought 
of, as their sole condition of church membership. This 
proclamation of the kingdom and our other verifiable 
Christ words are not true because Christ uttered them 



142 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

and Matthew wrote them, no more than the earth is 
round because Galileo and others so described it. But 
both He and Galileo are simply testifying to facts that 
have forever been true. 

Christ everywhere declared that our first and truest 
knowledge of God and of His kingdom is in the soul 
of each individual man, thus rendering a heaven on 
earth of some sort possible to every human soul, in 
which God and His kingdom are in any degree real- 
ized. This idea of heaven, xor of <^ heaven, is expressed 
in Greek without the article, or with the article in the 
singular number, implying the heaven, or the celestial 
sphere best known and revealed to us; or in English 
" our heaven;" while nothing whatever is located in 
and over all the heavens but God Himself, and His 
eternal kingdom. Christ nowhere intimates that he 
himself belongs there, but the clumsy interpolators of 
the 16th of Matthew, made their work doubly strong 
by representing Christ as boasting Peter, alone of all 
others, above himself, and up into the heavens, with a 
full equality with the Father, though He' Himself told 
the mother of Zebedee's children, that he had no power 
to raise any one, even to his own right hand; but 
instead of commanding them to teach that to the 
world, as any part of his gospel, he straightly charged 
them to tell no man of it. How Matthew alone, of all 
other scripture writers, came to disobey him. Latin- 
ized commentators do not explain, nor does Matthew 
himself. The plain fact is, he was never guilty of 
any such disobedience. 

If there is any work of prime necessity before the 
philosophers or teachers of our own age, and espe- 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 1J:3 

cially of our own land, that needs most of all to be 
done, it is a united crusade for the rescue of these 
ever-living Christ words, to take them wholly out 
from the barbarian philosophies into which old monks 
and despots of the church have translated them, and 
away from all the wood, hay, and stubble, which they 
had piled over them, and off from the quicksands and 
shoals on which they were pleased to base them, 
replacing them each and all on the solid rock of uni- 
versal reason and truth on which Christ himself based 
them. And even if our " poor human reason " cannot 
equal the infinite reason of God, the shallow pretenses 
of reason, in these old usurping barbarian monks and 
despots, cannot be allowed to forever surpass it. 

Does any man outside of an insane asylum expect 
that this work will ever be done by any majority vote 
of any conventions of antagonistic sectarists, each one 
foresworn from birth, and bound by all his social and 
worldly interests to the creed of his own church and 
sect, a proclaimed bias which would exclude him even 
as a witness before any decent human court ? We 
misjht as well look to such conventions to dio^est our 
dinners for us. It is easier to serve God and mammon 
than to serve this kingdom of the heavens and any pos- 
sible sect. " This icorcl I say unto you " was never sub- 
mitted to or even directed toward any possible human 
convention to be by them kept, preserved, translated, 
expounded, or enforced. Neither Christ nor His dis- 
ciples give any power or right to churches t-o supple- 
ment or change this proclaimed law and gospel of the 
kingdom, by additional scripture canons or creeds, or 
by interpreting it backwards into their old heathen- 



144 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

isms and despotisms the total destruction of which was 
its sole end and aim. If any church or society there- 
fore cannot find room for all its activities and benefi- 
cences on this platform alone, it is no more a church 
of Christ than our volunteer political parties, railroad 
monopolies, or jockey clubs, are co-equal parts of the 
government of the United States. Such a church is 
exactly what it calls itself, a partisan, papal, protest- 
ant, or Mormon church, or some other sect of that 
kind. Yet some of these mere sects* are continually 
plotting to enslave under their own apostate creeds the 
government and common schools of the United States, 
which are based wholly on the Christ word. But our 
laws, courts, and people, are resisting them, and will 
resist more and more, as time advances and intelligence 
increases. Which is in fact Godless, Christless, and 
graceless, a government with its schools and universi- 
ties, based on and pledged to nothing but this procla- 
mation of Christ, or our multitude of discordant sects 
pledged to church dogmas, that everywhere contradict, 
defy, and deny its entire contents? Rival popes, 
priests, and sects may continue to answer this question 
in one way, but the government and its schools and 
people will, as long as they exist*, give an opposite 
answer. 

We shall follow our old translation and text where- 
ever it is not misleading, even if it is not exact. 

IN TROD UCTOR Y HIS TOE Y. 

Matthew IV, IT. From that time. Jesus began to 
preach, and to say. Repent (see note 1) for the true 
kingdom of the heavens is at hand. That is: God's om- 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 145 

nipresent spiritual kingdom is about to be manifested 
and instituted. And he went about all Galilee, teach- 
ing in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good 
news of this kingdom^ and there followed him great 
multitudes. 

V. I. And seeing the multitude he went up toward 
the mountain; and when he had sat down, his disciples 
came unto him; 2. and he opened his mouth and taught 

them, saying, — 

Section I. 

1. THE INDWELLING, INSPIRING SPIRIT OF THIS 
KINGDOM, V. 3. 

2. AND THE PERSONS BLESSED BY IT, V. 11. 

3. THE ONLY RULE OR LAW OF EXTENDING OR PROP- 
AGATING THIS KINGDOM, V. 16. . 

V. 3. Blessed are the poor in spirit (see note 2) 
for theirs is the true hlngdoin of the heavens. 4. 
Blessed are they that mourn; for they will be com- 
forted. 5. Blessed are the meek; for they will inherit 
the earth. 6. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst 
after righteousness; for they will be filled. 7. Blessed 
are the merciful; for they will obtain mercy. 8. 
Blessed are the pure in heart; for they will look (see 
note 3) to the true God. 9. Blessed are the peace- 
makers; for they shall be called sons of God. 10. 
Blessed are they that have been persecuted for right- 
eousness' sake; for theirs is this hhigdomof the heavens. 

11. Blessed are ye (of this spirit) even when men 
may reproach you, and persecute you, and say all 
manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. 12. 
Rejoice, and be exceedingly glad; for great is your 
reward in the heavens; for so persecuted they the 



146 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

prophets which were before you. 13. Ye are the salt 
of the earth; but if the salt have lost its savor, where- 
with shall it be salted ? It is thenceforth good for 
nothing, but to be cast out and trodden under foot of 
men. 14. Ye are the light of the world. A city set 
on a hill can never be hid. 15. Neither do men liojht a 
lamp, and put it under the bushel, (see note 3^,) but on 
the stand; and it shineth unto all that are in the house. 

16. EVEN so LET YOUR LIGHT SHINE BEFORE MEN, 
THAT THEY MAY SEE YOUR GOOD WORKS, AND GLORIFY 
YOUR FATHER IN THE HEAVENS (sCC UOtC 4). 

Section II. 

y. 17. UNIVERSAL MORAL LAW DEFINED AS OMNI- 
PRESENT, ETERNAL, AN© UNCHANGEABLE; V. 18. Mud- 

ing in its lesser as loell as its greater commandments^' Y. 
W. above all teachings of Scribes a,nd' Pharisees ; V. 21, 
all old time statements of laws rejected^' because a bad 
spirit leads toward increasing evils, toward the court, 
the jail, and the gallows j or as they expressed it, toward 
their judgment, sanhedrim and gehenna of fire/ 
therefore check it at once, at %ohaiever loss or peril, be- 
fore attempting any act of formal devotion: Y. 25, for 
all "misdoings are sure to recoil on the doer, even to the 
uttermost farthing ; Y. 27, for moral law attaches to the 
soul itself as really as gravity does to matter; and a 
crime intended is a crhne perpetrated; Y. 33, all speech 
shouldbe simple, sincere, and honest; Y 39, chech evil 
in yourself, rather than resist it in others, by not aveng- 
ing your own wrongs, or taking the law into your own 
hands, or rejecting the needs of a needy man. 

V. IT. Do not think that I came to destroy the true 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 147 

law (see note 5) or the true prophets; I never came to 
destroy, but to complete, 18. For verily I say unto 
you, till heaven and earth can have passed away, one 
jot or one tittle can in no wise pass away from this 
true law, till all things have become genuine. 19. 
Whosoever, therefore,''^ (see note 6,) may break one of 
these least commandments, and may teach men so, 
shall be called least in this hingdom of the heavens^ 
but whosoever may do and teach them, he shall be 
called great in this kingdom of the heavens. 20. For 
I say unto you, that except your righteousness may 
have exceeded that of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye can 
in no case have entered into the hingdom of the heavens. 
21. Ye have heard that it was said to them of old 
time, thou shalt never kill; and whosoever shall kill 
shall be in danger of our judgment; 22, but I say vmto 
you, that every one who is angry with his brother 
will be in danger of our judgment; and whosoever 
may say to his brother, Raca, will be in danger of the 
council; but whosoever may say, fool, will be in 
danger toward our Gehenna of fire (see note 7). 23. 
If therefore,"^ thou art offering thy gift at the altar, 
and there remember est that thy brother hath ought 
against thee, 24. leave there thy gift before the altar, 
and go thy way, first be reconciled to thy brother, and 
then come and offer thy gift. 25. Agree with thine 
adversary quickly, whiles thou art with him in the 
way ; lest haply the adversary deliver thee to the 
judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and 
thou be cast into prison. 26. Yerily I say unto thee, 
thou canst by no means come out thence, till thou 
hast paid the last farthing. 



148 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

27. Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt 
never comrait adultery; 28. But I say unto you, that 
every one that looketh on a woman to lust after her 
hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. 
29. And if thy right eye causeth thee to stumble, 
pluck it out, and cast it from thee; for it is profitable 
for thee that one of thy members should perish, and 
not thy whole body be cast toward Gehenna. 30. 
And if thy right hand causeth thee to stumble, cut it 
off, and cast it from thee; for it is profitable for thee 
that one of thy members should perish, and not thy 
whole body be cast toward Gehenna. 31. It was said 
also. Whosoever may put away his wife, let him give 
her a writing of divorcement; 32. But I say unto 
you, that every one that putteth away his wife, saving 
for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit 
adultery; and whosoever shall marry her, when she is 
put away committeth adultery. (See note 8.) 

33. Again, ye have heard that it was said to them 
of old time, Thou shalt never forswear thyself, but 
shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths; 31. But I 
say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven, for 
it is the throne of God; 35. Nor by the earth, for it 
is the footstool of his feet; nor by Jerusalem, for it is 
the city of the great King. 36. Neither shalt thou 
swear by thy head, for thou canst never make one hair 
white or black. 37. But let your speech be, Yea, 
yea; Nay, nay; and whatsoever is more than these is of 
evil. (See note 9.) 

38. Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an 
eye, and a tooth for a tooth; 39. But I say unto you, 
Do not merely resist evil (in others); but whosoever 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 149 

smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other 
also. 40. And if any man would go to law with 
thee, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak 
also. 41. And whosoever shall compel thee to go 
one mile, go with him twain. 42. Give to him that 
asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee, 
thou shouldst not merely turn away. (See note 10.) 

Section III. 

HOW TO FIND AND FORM OUR TRUE IDEAL OF THIS 
INVISIBLE FATHER IN THE HEAVENS AND BECOME HIS 
TRUE SONS. The three great LAWS OF ALL MORAL 
BEING, COMMONLY CALLED THE LAWS OF LIBERTY, 
EQUALITY AND FRATERNITY, CLEARLY STATED, DEFINED 
AND ILLUSTRATED. 

I. The primal law of all true devotion and liberty. 

II. The only jpossible law of equality of rights in 
righteousness. 

III. The only law of fraternity and co-operation in 
action and distribution of results. 

Law 7, Chapter Y, verse ^8; Lavj TT^ Chapter VT, 
verse 33; Laio III., Chapter YII^ verse 12; each at- 
tended with its appropriate introduction and cautions^ 
as indicated by paragraphs Z, II and III. 

I. V. 43. Ye have heard that it was said. Thou 
shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy; but I 
say unto you, 44. Do good to your enemies, bless 
them that curse you, be good to them that hate you, 
and pray for them which despitefully use you; 45. 
that ye may become sons of yoior Father in the heav- 
ens; for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and the 
good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. 46. 



150 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

For if ye love them that love you, what rev^^ard have 
ye? do not even the publicans the same? 47. And if 
ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than 
others? do not even the Gentiles the same? 

Law I. Be ye therefore- perfect, as your 
Father in the heavens is perfect. (See note 11.) 

VI. 1. But take heed that ye do not your deeds 
of charity before men, to be seen of them; else ye have 
710 reward with your Father in the heavens. 2. When 
therefore^ thou doest alms, sound not a trumpet before 
thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in 
the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily 
I say unto you, they have their reward. 3. But 
when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know 
what thy right hand doeth; 4. That thine alms may 
be in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret will 
reward thee openly. 5. And when ye pray, be never 
as the hypocrites are; for they love to stand and pray 
in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, 
that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, 
that they have their reward. 6. But thou, when thou 
prayest, enter into thine inner chamber, and having 
shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret, 
and thy Father which seeth in secret will reward thee 
openly. 7. And in praying, use not vain repetitions 
as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be 
heard for their much speaking. 8. Be not therefore^" 
like unto them; for your Father knoweth what things 
ye have need of, before ye ask him. 9. After this 
manner, therefore"^, pray ye; 

Oar Father who art mi the heavens^ hallowed he thy 
name. Thy Jcingdom come. Thy will he done on earth 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 151 

as it is done in every heaven. Give tis this day our 
daily hread^ and forgive us our debts as toe have also 
forgiven our debtoi's. Lead us 7iot merely into trial ^ 
hiot deliver tts from its evil. For thine is the kingdom, 
and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen. 
(See note 12.) 14. For if ye forgive men their tres- 
passes, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. 
15. But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither 
will your Father forgive your trespasses. 16. More- 
over, when ye fast, be not as the hypocrites, of a sad 
countenance; for they disfigure their faces, that they 
may be seen of men to fast. Verily I say unto you, 
they have their reward. 17. But thou, when thou 
fastest, anoint thy head, and wash thy face; 18. That 
thou be not seen of men to fast, but of thy Father 
which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in se- 
cret will reward thee. 

II. VI. 19. Do not merely lay up for yourselves 
treasures upon the earth, where moth and rust doth 
consume, and where thieves break through and steal; 
20. But lay up. for yourselves treasures in heaven, 
where neither moth nor rust doth consume, and where 
thieves never break through nor steal; 21. For where 
your treasure is, there will your heart be also. 22. 
The lamp of the body is the eye; if therefore*, thine 
eye be single, thy whole body will be full of light. 
23. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body will be 
full of darkness. If therefore* the light that is in thee 
be darkness, how great is the darkness! 24. No man 
can serve two masters ; for either he will hate the 
one, and love the other; or else he will hold to one, 
and despise the other. Ye can never serve God and 



152 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

mammon. 25. Therefore, I say unto you, Be not 
merely anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or 
what ye shall drink; nor yet for yoar body, what ye 
shall put on. Is not the life more than the food, and 
the body than the raiment? 26. Behold the birds of 
the air, they never sow, neither do they reap, nor 
gather into barns; and your Heavenly Father feedeth 
them. Are not ye of much more value than they ? 
27. And which of you by being anxious can add one 
cubit unto his stature ? 28. And why are ye anxious 
concerning raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, 
how they grow; They never toil, neither do they spin; 
29. Yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his 
glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30. But if 
God doth so clothe the grass of the field, which to- 
day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall He 
not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? 31. 
Be not therefore*, merely anxious, saying. What shall 
we eat ? or, What shall we drink? or. Wherewithal shall 
we be clothed? 32. For after all these things do the 
Gentiles seek; for your Heavenly Father knoweth that 
ye have need of all these things. ^ 

Law II. But seek ye first this true kingdom 
OF the true god and its righteousness, and all 
THESE THINGS shcill he added unto you. (See note 13.) 

34. Be not therefore*'^ merely anxious for the mor- 
row; for the morrow will bring anxieties of its own. 
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. VII. 1. 
Do not merely judge others, lest ye be judged. 2. For 
with what judgment ye judge, ye will be judged; and 
with what measure ye mete, it will be measured unto 
you. 3. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in 



IN ALL THE AVORLDS. 153 

thy brother's eye, but never considerest the beam that 
is in thine own eye ? 4. Or how wilt thou say to thy 
brother, let me cast out the mote out of thine eye; and 
lo, the beam is in thine own eye? 5. Thou hypocrite, 
cast out first the beam out of thine own eye; and then 
shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of 
thy brother's eye. 

III. VII. 6. (See note 14.) Do not give that 
which is holy unto the dogs, and do not cast your 
pearls before the swine, lest haply they trample them 
under their feet, and turn and rend you. T. Ask, 
and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; 
knock, and it shall be opened unto you; 8. For 
every one that asketh, receiveth; and he that seeketh, 
findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. 
9. Or what man is there of you, who, if his son shall 
ask him for a loaf, will give him a stone; 10. Or if 
he shall ask for a fish, will give him a serpent ? 11. 
If ye then* being evil, know how to give good gifts 
unto your children, how much more shall your Father 
in the heavens give good things to those who ask him? 

Law III. All things therefore* whatsoever 

YE WOULD THAT MEN SHOULD DO UNTO YOU, EVEN SO 
DO YE ALSO UNTO THEM; FOR THIS IS THE LAW AND THE 

PROPHETS. (See note 17.) 

13. Enter ye in by the narrow gate; for wide is 
the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth toward 
destruction, and many are those passing through if. 
14. For narrow is the gate, and straitened the way, 
that leadeth toward life, and few are those finding it. 
(See note 15.) 15. Beware of false prophets, which 
come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are rav- 

TI 



154 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

ening wolves. 16. By their fruits (See note 16) ye 
shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or 
figs of thistles? 17^ Even so every good tree bring- 
eth forth good fruit; but the corrupt tree bringeth 
forth evil fruit. 18. A good tree can never bring 
forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth 
good fruit. 19. Every tree that bringeth not forth 
good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. 20. 
Therefore by their fruits ye shall know them. 21. 
Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall 
enter into this Mngdom of the heavens; but he that 
doeth the will of my Father in the heavens. 22. Many 
will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, did we not 
prophesy in thy name, and in thy name cast out 
devils, and in thy name do many mighty works ? 23. 
And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you; 
depart from me, ye that work iniquity. 

Section IV. 

Conclusion : 

DECLARING THIS PROCLAMATION TO BE WHAT IT 
ALONE IN FACT NOW IS, EVER HAS BEEN, AND FOREVER 
MUST BE, NAMELY, A CLEAR, CONCISE, AND ORDERLY 
PHILOSOPHICAL STATEMENT OF THE ONLY REASONS OF 
god's kingdom of the HEAVENS, NEVER BEFORE UT- 
TERED AND NOWHERE ELSE FOUND TO-DAY, IN ANY 
OTHER BIBLE, BOOK, OR CREED, WHILE MOST OF OUR 
CHURCH CREEDS, SO-CALLED, FLATLY CONTRADICT AL- 
MOST ITS ENTIRE WHOLE. 

24. Everyone therefore'^ which heareth these 
REASONS OF MINE, and practiccth them, shall be 
likened unto a wise man, which built his house upon 



IN ALL THE WOKLDS. 155 

the rock; 25. And the rain descended, and the floods 
came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; 
and it never fell; for it was founded upon the rock. 
26. And every one that heareth these keasons of mine ^ 
and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish 
man, which built his house upon the sand; 27. And 
the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds 
blew, and smote upon that house*, and it fell; and great 
was the fall thereof. 

28. And it came to pass, when Jesus ended these 
words, the multitude were astonished at his teaching; 
29. For he taught, them as one having authority, and 
not as their scribes. 



156 THE ONLY GOOD THING 



NOTES. 

(1.) Chap. IV, V. 17. Repent means change your mind and re- 
adjust yourselves to it, for the true kingdom of the heavens, 
forever over all possible .jvorlds and beings, is at hand. (See 
Treadwell Walden's book, and endorsements of it by Phillips 
Brooks, Howard Crosby and others.) The spirit of the Christ 
word, repent, is look upward and forward and rejoice, for the 
kingdom of the Father of all is at hand. The spirit of the Lat- 
inized "Repente" is. Look downward and behind you, into the 
dark hole of your past sins, for which you were damned before 
you were born, and no escape is possible but by believing in ou?^ 
church dogmas. 

(2.) Chap. V, V. 3. Blessedness is far more than happiness, for 
it attaches to the soul itself, and is dependent on no external 
conditions. Blessed are the poor in spirit, or, those that feel 
their spiritual need. Luke has it; Blessed are ye poor, making 
poverty itself a blessing. If this is so, heaven itself ought to be 
symbolized by wigwams standing in the mud, instead of palaces 
on golden streets. But a felt need of any good is the one vital pre- 
requisite to all possible attainment of that good. This first verse, 
therefore, strikes exactly the right philosophical keynote to this 
most philosophical but untheological of all human utterances. 
And our theologists begin to twist it out of all shape, by refer- 
ring to Luke and otherwise, before they even begin to translate 
it. Every man of this sort of spirit is here, and now, right in 
this ever-being kingdom of the heavens, as really as Christ was 
while talking to Nicodemus; for this kingdom of the heaVens is 
wherever the presence of the Father of all is realized, even if it 
be on a cross. 

(3.) Chap. V, V. 8. Matthew uses the word liorao as we do our 
word see, whether with the eye of sense or the eye of the soul, or, 
to look to, or look after. Chap. V, v. 15. Common men do not, 
but well-trained ecclesiastics always do. Show us the church 
that does not first put its own orthodox bushel over this divine 
light, and then sit down on the bushel and begin to write out 
and proclaim its own utterly heathen creed, as a substitute for 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. ' 157 

it, and we would go a thousand miles to join such a church at 
once; yet this proclamation is the only full and complete provi- 
sion for all divine law and all human need and infirmity possible 
either to God or man, so far as we know. 

(4.) Chap. V, V. 16. This ruling makes all true disciples 
throughout the world, in whatever work they are engaged, the 
co-equal and fully ordained ministers and missionaries of God 
and of Christ to the full extent of their several abilities, whether 
in the kitchen or in the church, in a jail or on a throne. The 
Jews' old temple service had to be burnt with fire, its site sown 
with salt, and its priesthoods scattered to the winds, before this 
great idea could get any foothold on earth, and even to-day it 
has a very poor and meagre one. They should all wash, mend 
and cook, hoe, hammer and work, think, preach and print, and 
in each do better work than others, heartily, as unto the Lord, 
and not unto men. In this way alone can all work and all rivalry 
become truly divine. 

(5.) Chap. V, V. 17. Christ meant the real law of God, of na- 
ture, and of being, not that which those of olden time said Moses 
had written about. The first never needs any completion, the 
last always sadly needed it. 

(6.) Chap. V, V. 19. Oun means "in view of all before said," 
and is not fully translated by "therefore." It cannot be trans- 
lated by any single English word, as it implies an inference from 
all that has gone before it, and not from any single clause. In 
these three chapters it occurs thirteen times, binding the whole 
into one closely compacted piece of logic. It is used only the same 
number of times in the nine chapters following it. We mark 
with a star each of the thirteen words which attempt to trans- 
ate it. 

(7.) Chap. V, V. 22. Eis — "toward." Christ's hearers all knew 
that they could not be endangered "in" their Gehenna of fire, or 
their extreme legal penalty, for the Roman power had prohibited 
that; they could only be put in danger in that direction, or to- 
ward it, so accurately does Christ everywhere adjust His speech 
to known facts and conditions. While in the 10th Chapter he 
says that God has the pov/er to destroy in Gehenna, he is careful 
to add that He will never do it. This term is never used by any 
speaker or writer out of sight of Jerusalem. There never was 
any more reason for translating "Gehenna" by our word hell 
than there was for translating Council or Sanhedrim, Jerusalem 
or Joppa, by that word. 



158 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

Indeed, the old Jewish church turned all Jerusalem and all 
Judea into a hell, in trying to enforce their theology upon Christ; 
as the old Papal church turned the whole Roman Empire into a 
helJ, in trying to enforce their theology upon the world. Years 
ago Canon Farrar most solemnly declared to all English speaking 
people that the words "hell," "everlasting," and "damnation" never 
ought to have been in the English Bible. But such an amend- 
ment would utterly annihilate the creed of every papacy and 
sect in Christendom. Yet, if Canon Farrar should speak again, 
he would add largely to his list of contraband words. 

(8.) Chap. V, V. 32. In Christ's time everywhere, and more 
than half over the world to-day, a woman thus arbitrarily and 
ruthlessly turned from family and home into the street, has no 
possible recourse but to beg, or steal, or starve, or do worse, and 
Christ could not recognize the validity of any such divorces. 

(9.) Chap. V, V. 37. On this ruling, Mr. Bradlaugh, of England, 
seems more Christian than the whole English Church and Par- 
liament put together. While both Moses and Paul do not hesi- 
tate to put God Himself upon His oath. 

(10.) Chap. V, V. 42. The true spirit of this whole passage in 
English is: "Do not merely withstand evil in others, but also 
correct it in yourself; first, by not avenging your own wrongs; 
second, by not taking the law into your own hands. Give only 
to him that asketh and feels his need, not as Luke says, to 
everyone that asketh." Our civil law recognizes these princi- 
ples, apart from which no free and beneficent government can 
exist. 

(11.) Law I. If each individual soul forms its own ideal of 
this ever-present and indwelling fatherhood, from all he feels 
within him or sees and knows around about him, and strives to 
worship and conform himself to it as he himself best knows, 
which all the Christ words and all our American law admit to be 
the inborn right of every human soul, he lays within himself the 
basis of all true worship and service to both God and man. 
While the powers of earth and evil may imprison, or torture, or 
kill such a man, they cannot enslave him, as all history shows. 
It is therefore the primal law of all true worship and true liberty 
ever upon earth. Doubtless the ideal and service of the angel or 
the man will be higher than that of the child. Perhaps in a 
universe where no two visible things are alike, no two moral be- 
ings ever held the same ideal of the universal Father of all. 
(12) The Lord's Prayer.— If we pray according to Christ's 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 159 

authority, or in His name, we can never pray for anything local, 
individual, or personal alone, but for all mankind, and only for 
those things they all need as well as we. Such prayers are 
always answered in spirit as soon as uttered; but prayers advis- 
ing or directing God what to do with us and our friends are 
never answered or heeded, and never ought to be. Christ's ex- 
ample and precepts everywhere enforce this view. In Matt., 
Chap. XVIII, V. 19, the disciples are required to agree in every- 
thing which they desire of the Father, which can be realized in 
this prayer alone, but our translators have let them off with 
agreeing on any one thing. According to Christ the entire econ- 
omy of being is forever set toward the realization of this prayer 
as its sole end and aim. Hence, it is vastly more important that 
we should agree with God in everything, than that he should 
agree with as in anything. 

(13.) Law II. As we have shown, what is right, is what is 
most ft to the case in hand or the need required. In its very 
nature, it is everywhere and always the first thing to be sought 
out and sought after at whatever cost or hazard. So infinitely 
various is its form, to suit the infinitely varied conditions, that 
its details can neither be foreseen or premised or defined, except 
as respects its aim and end, which is to do good to all and evil 
to none. And we are everywhere told to seek it everywhere and 
always for ourselves, because it cannot in detail be laid down to 
us. In spirit and thought the way is clear. It is always right 
to seek to do good and not to do evil. So in outward action, 
some few things may be mentioned which will always be found 
either good or evil, but only a very few. In the vast majority of 
cases, the Spirit of God and of Christ within the soul itself is 
the only possible judge and guide. Therefore real right will 
forever be a thing to be sought by that soul, as new relations 
and conditions arise before it; and no dead dogmas of the buried 
ages, or petrified formulas of the present hour will help it out. 
Self-reliance on the ever-living voice in every rational soul is our 
only hope. "That they all may be one; as thou. Father, art in 
me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us," etc., etc. 
This alone is the Christ rule for our guidance. The very inmost 
vital point of all that He ever said or taught or did, which most 
of the ecclesiastics of all the ages have slurred over, passed by, 
and even formally condemned as a sort of weak and foolish mys- 
ticism. Is it so? Then His whole system is practically worth- 
less instead of being, as we believe it to be, the only profoundly 



160 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

philosophical system extant; for God is to-day not only in all 
souls, but in all creatures and things, each after its kind, or we , 
have not a scrap of proof that He ever was in anything. This is 
the only law that gives promise of outward good things, and God 
has everywhere fulfilled His promise to the letter. For, in all 
lands and ages, all peoples have risen or fallen in the sphere of 
their social civilization and outward good, precisely as they have 
in spirit and in fact heeded this law; as necessarily as the mer- 
cury rises and falls with the temperature. 

(14.) Chap. VII, V. 6. As we approach the third law of fra- 
ternity toward all men, we are admonished that we need caution 
lest they befool us, and prayer lest we ourselves become unfeel- 
ing. 

(15.) Law III. Representative Horr, of Michigan, as a lawyer, 
demonstrated to a large audience in Jacksonville, that this third 
law of Christ is the only law extant upon earth to-day, upon the 
basis of which, it is possible to settle our vexed_]questions of Capi- 
tal and Labor. We have never heard that demonstration ques- 
tioned by a single hearer. It never can be, for these three 
laws of personal self-government are, as we have shown, the 
sole ultimate philosophical basis of all our American institutions. 

(16.) Chap. VII, V. 14. Christ did not here in the outset pre- 
dict the final failure of His kingdom, as the old translation seems 
to imply. 

(17.) Chap. VII, V. 16. Not by their theories or creeds or pro- 
fessions or beliefs. 



Such is the unquestionable logical basis of Christ's 
gospel. 

It is wholly legitimate to approach this gospel, either 
on the logical side of pure reason, or its emotive side 
of deepest affection; but we cannot comprehend it with- 
out both. 

We have only attempted to outline it on its logical 
side. Prof. Drummond in his discourse on ' The 
Greatest Thing in the World," has beautifully evolved 
for us the emotive side. 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 161 

If this gospel, as Christ has given it to us in His own 
words, is not fit to be taught in all o\xy public schools — 
high and low, as the proper basis of all human well 
being, in this world and in all worlds, without being 
first overwhelmed and bedeviled with heathen theolo- 
gies, whether Hebrew, Papal or Mediaeval, Protestant 
or Mormon, we have nothing in our schools fit to be 
taught, and never had anything. Christ's real gospel 
begins with every a b c scholar, and embraces all phil- 
osophy possible to men or angels. Its every word is 
verifiable by the experience of the race for fifty cen- 
turies. All, therefore, that agrees with it, in what- 
ever Bible, book or creed, is good and true, and is of 
God. Whatever does not agree is neither good nor 
true, nor of God. 

These simple truths, as repeated, illustrated and en- 
forced by his own sad but beautiful and glorious life, 
even to the moment of his cruel death on the cross, 
constitute its great illuminative and emotive power over 
the human heart-ancl soul, wholly unequalled and irre- 
sistible wherever truly known. 

Christ everj^where teaches that salvation comes by 
faith in His own words and His own life, alone, ver- 
ifiable by all that is within us and by all that is round 
about us. 

The church everywhere teaches that salvation comes 
by belief in its dogmas alone — verifiable by nothing 
under heaven but the persistent insolence of the dog- 
matist. 

Which is true and rio-ht ? 

Which is of God, and which is of men ? 



162 THE ONLY GOOD THING 



SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE. 
Interpolation 1. 

. But it is said that this Proclamation is interpolated: 
and what is the proof of it ? We have demonstrated 
from the record that it is the only thing that any apos- 
tles or preachers were ever commanded to proclaim, 
preach or teach in the name of Christ; that it is the 
only rational basis of the philosophy of the Christ word, 
either extant or thinkable to-day; that, so long as it 
was allowed to keep its place by its supreme benefi- 
cence it easily over-mastered the combined bigotry of 
the Jew, the philosophy of the Greek, and the power 
of the Roman. But, when the heathen and apostate 
church word began to push it aside to make room for 
its usurped and insolent dogmatisms the dark ages be- 
gan to creep on; and like a pestilential fog, to cover 
all lands, and to extingaish all art, science, literature 
and freedom from the world, forsooth, " in the name 
of the Lord of all. ' ' 

But, since the revival of art, letters and literature, 
every cause, whether of religion, or of law and gov- 
ernment, of education, science, or art, that has clearly 
based itself on this repulsed and discarded old sermon, 
as its only law and gospel, has, at last, triumphantly 
and gloriously succeeded; while every cause that has 
based itself on the dress parade wood, hay and stubble 
of the church word has ingloriously and ignominiously 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 163 

failed, simply because this one marvelous, brief 
Christ word embraces within itself all that is true and 
good in the church-Bible, and in all other possible 
books. In such a case, the supercilious pedantry that 
prates about interpolations has no scrap of truth, 
science, or sense in it, unless it means that it was in- 
terpolated, as were all our axioms of geometry and 
numbers, of science and art, of law and government, 
of cause and effect, of reason and truth, by that one 
supreme invisible power that is perpetuall3^in all, over 
all, and through all that can exist, in whom we live and 
move and have our being, as this Christ word alone 
teaches us. 

If we cannot defend this only proclaimed and com- 
manded Christ word on which our Republic is based, 
against all usurping papacies and sects, we shall go 
where the Greeks, the Jews, and the Romans have al- 
ready gone; for God will, at last, deal with the apos- 
tate Bible — and creed- makers of these latter times, as 
He did with the older ones. Divines and churchmen 
were not born into the world to concoct or administer 
the creeds and laws of this Kingdom of the Heavens; 
but simply to heed, teach, and obey them, just as all 
other men are. A child needs his little ideal of God 
and duty as much as the archangel needs his larger 
one. This Christ word alone, of all human utterances, 
provides equally for both, and neither too much nor 
too little for any one. 

About a century ago, our political fathers based our 
state, as an untried experiment, solely on this divine 
Proclamation. In less than a century, something like 
two hundred millions of people voluntarily adopted or 



164: THE ONLY GOOD THING 

approved it as their own; and it now seems predes- 
tined to go hand in hand with this Kingdom of the 
Heavens around the globe. The papacies and the 
sects began the making of their apostate creeds fifteen 
centuries ago. They have enforced submission to 
them by the combined brute force of the mightiest 
empires till they wore out the empires themselves in 
their service. And to-day no one of them can spread 
itself over a single intelligent village without some ap- 
peal to fraud or brute force. Is all this of God or of 
man ? And who interpolated it ? Are you not taking 
too much upon yourselves, ye children of Levi ? Creed- 
makers always begin their work on the interpolated 
sixteenth chapter of Matthew. They thus convenient- 
ly skip or set aside as an old sermon all that Christ 
ever declared to be the sole essentials of His own King- 
dom, law and gospel, and at once proceed to substitute 
their own Bible dogmas in its place. Is this a fair 
way to treat any Bible, book, or utterance ? What 
Christ thought of it, He very plainly tells us in His 
only remaining public speech in the twenty-third of 
Matthew. 

It is the duty of every American freeman, whether 
white or black, saint or sinner, to insist upon it that 
the divine principles of this Kingdom shall be taught 
by precept and example as Christ everywhere directs, 
in every school on this continent, high or low, rich or 
poor, as the only reliable, ultimate, philosophical ba- 
sis of all truth and goodness, in all families, schools 
and sects, over all states, kingdoms, nations and 
worlds where moral beings can exist; and over which 
the great Republic of God, the ever being Kingdom of 



IX ALL THE WORLDS. 165 

the Heavens, can be extended. If then the church still 
persists in educating the mere tools and slaves of the 
creeds, the papacies and the sects, while the state and 
the people are educating only the free men of the 
Lord, this Kingdom of the Heavens cannot remain 
doubtful or far away. But, as in Apostolic times, in 
spite of crown and cowl, it will soon be lodged in the 
heart of hearts of every man that treads the globe. 

n. 

All the utterances of human tongues and pens, 
throughout the ages, that are based on and harmonize 
with these divine axioms and "- reasons^ ^ of all highest 
truth, are themselves inspired of God and are true and 
good, in whatever book or Bible they may be found. 
All that are not based on this eternal harmony and 
concord of being will turn out false and evil, though 
all the Bible and books and empires and churches of 
the world conspire to uphold them. Therefore, for 
these reasons, these were the only truths that Christ 
ever commanded His disciples or anyone else to pro- 
claim and teach in His name. One £:reat trouble with 
our Bible is, however, not that it is so empty of these 
great truths, but that it is so very full of them. But 
even Peter himself, the great head of the church, ad- 
monishes us that no prophecy of scripture is of any 
idiotic or scrap text interpolation, after the fashion of 
all our creeds, which are nothing but a dress parade of 
idiotic scrap texts. 

"/have given them thy word." "He that heareth 
7ny voice is of the truth." " Everything I have heard 
of my Father, I have made known unto you." '''My 



166 THE ONLY GOOD THING 

words they are spirit, they are life . " ' ' The Fathei; 
hath committed all judgment unto the Son, yet I judge 
no man; but the words that I speak unto you, they 
shall judge you in every last day of trial." "I have 
finished the work which thou gavest me to do." John 
xvii, 4. 

Every Bible creed in Christendom is based on a flat 
contradiction of all these texts, and of nearly all else 
that Christ ever authorized any man to preach or teach 
in His name. 

The Real American Issue. 

For some fifteen hundred years, the religion of Christ 
has been caricatured and bedeviled by all sorts of 
church and Bible creeds but His own, from the first 
fraudulent and lying Apostles' Creed down to that of 
our own Joe Smith. We have made our own great 
Republic the free stamping ground of them all toge- 
ther, and they are now all about our ears. We have 
no penal state — or church-law — that we can invoke 
against any one of them. We must stand before them 
as Christ directs; each man for himself, or not at all. 
Shall we now then let loose the trained blood-hounds 
of each of these apostate sects to hunt down, one by 
one, the only men in the Republic to whom the real 
God-word and Christ-word has vouchsafed to give a 
decent share of common sense and common humanity, 
as the same apostate church of the Jews, at first, 
hunted down the Christ Himself and all His apostles; 
or shall we ourselves return at once to our only pro- 
claimed and verifiable Christ word, and earnestly ex- 
hort all our comrades to do the same, on which alone 



IN ALL THE WORLDS. 167 

our Republic is based, and which alone we, both as 
Christians and Americans, are bound to uphold and 
defend at the peril of our lives and of all we either 
have or hope for ? Which shall we do, for we cannot 
do both ? 

"All hail the power of Jesus' name! 

Let angels prostrate fall; 
Bring forth the royal diadem, 
And crown Him Lord of all. 



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